Press Release

Leading voice AI Company, Skit announces the appointment of Dr. Ashish Gupta to its Board of Directors

Leading voice AI Company, Skit, announced today the appointment of Dr. Ashish Gupta as an independent member of its Board of Directors. Ashish, who lives in California, has 20 years of leadership and board experience from several successful technology companies. He will be actively involved in helping Skit in all aspects of the business including organization building, product positioning, and go-to-market execution.

 

We are pleased to have Ashish onboard to help us navigate the next stage of growth for the company. Together, we will work towards building a future-ready, AI-enabled product for our customers across the globe,” said Sourabh Gupta, CEO, and co-founder of Skit. “Ashish will help further fuel innovation for Skit across all three markets, to transform customer engagement. He will work closely with our leadership team and this will be a huge step in helping us transform our vision into reality.”

Ashish has started several enterprises in his career including Junglee (AMZN), Tavant Technologies, Helion Ventures, and Drishti Technologies. He has invested in several startups and businesses including Flipkart, MuSigma, MakeMyTrip (MMYT), redBus, Upwork (UPWK), and Infoedge (NAUKRI), among others, and served as a board member in several of them. He is a Kauffman Fellow, holding a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur where he was awarded the President’s Gold medal and the Distinguished Alumnus Award. Ashish has a talent for identifying successful businesses in their nascence and was one of the first backers of Flipkart, having invested in the e-commerce giant way back in 2009.

“Skit’s approach is revolutionary in the voice enablement market which has traditionally only ‘pulled together’ pieces from different vendors. By having control of the full stack, Skit has the flexibility needed to deliver a great experience while retaining the ability to work across different applications. Much like what the full-stack approach did for apple (with the iPhone) or Amazon (with etailing), Skit too has the potential to usher in a new era for how customers interact with complex pieces of software like banking systems, insurance, and credit systems, shopping applications, booking systems and a lot more. I look forward to the privilege of working with Sourabh, Akshay, and the Skit team to help redefine how customers use voice to interact with software systems. Their strategic thinking, learning agility, execution skills, and hunger, equip them to build a large company in this nascent and enormous space,” said Dr. Ashish Gupta.

 

Skit is an artificial intelligence SaaS voice automation company. Given that hyper-personalization and enhancement of customer experience are Skit’s strongest suit, the company will potentially address the USD 300 billion voice customer service market with its voice AI platform, Vernacular Intelligent Voice Automation (VIVA). VIVA replicates human-like conversation and understands the speaker’s intent while translating other unique speech characteristics that enable more efficient query resolutions. With over 10 million hours of training data, VIVA is able to understand 16+ languages, 160+ dialects and help enterprise clients reduce 40-50% in average call handle time, enable 40-60% drop in operational costs, and CSAT scores of 4.5+ post-deployment.

About Skit

Skit is an AI-first SaaS voice automation company. Its suite of speech and language solutions enables enterprises to automate their call center operations. With over 10 million hours of training data, its product – Vernacular Intelligent Voice Assistant (VIVA) can currently respond in over 16+ languages, covering over 160+ dialects and replicating human-like conversations. Skit serves a variety of enterprise clients across diverse sectors such as banking and financial services, including insurance, securities and NBFCs, food and beverage, eCommerce, automotive, and travel and tourism. Few prominent clients include Axis Bank, Hathway, Porter, and Barbeque Nation. In May 2020, the Bangalore-based start-up secured its Series A funding of USD 5.1 million and recently raised a Series B round of USD 23 million, and has grown to over 200+ employees. The company has been featured as one of the top-notch start-ups in the Cisco Launchpad’s Cohort 6 and is a part of the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovators Community. The voice AI leader has also been listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia start-ups 2021 for its remarkable industry innovation and recently been awarded ‘Tech Startup of the Year’ in Artificial Intelligence 2021 by Entrepreneur India, further underscoring its market dominance and unparalleled expertise. The company is now expanding in the United States and Southeast Asian markets in a bid to take its unique platform to global enterprises.

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