Infosys co-founder Gopalakrishnan invests in startup Uniphore

Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has invested an undisclosed amount in Chennai-based speech recognition solutions company Uniphore Software Systems in a Series A round of funding.

The funding will fuel Uniphore’s global expansion and product and core technology development plans.

Existing investors IDG Ventures India, India Angel Network (IAN), Yournest Fund and Stata Venture Partners also participated in this round of funding.

"Continuing on my theme of backing inclusive innovations, I am optimistic of the success of Uniphore," Kris Gopalakrishnan said in a statement.

"Man-Machine communication is one of the more complex problems to solve. Uniphore’s vision lends possibility of finding a solution to this very difficult problem and the company has already made substantial progress,” he added.

Uniphore had earlier raised $1 million in an angel round of funding and was incubated at IIT Madras, where it got a grant of $100,000 from National Research Development Corporation in 2008.

"Gopalakrishnan’s experience in building mammoth and global businesses will help us move in the right direction. This investment is a powerful endorsement of Uniphore’s ability to provide value to our enterprise customers across industries through speech recognition technology. Additionally, these Series A funds help us attract the best of the talent the industry has to offer in this high-tech niche," said Umesh Sachdev, co-founder and CEO, Uniphore Software Systems.

Uniphore's solutions use speech as a medium for human-machine interaction and allow any software application to understand and respond to natural human speech.

Launched in 2008, Uniphore was featured in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 companies list in India for 2014. It has been profitable from the second year of its operation.

After Gopalakrishnan stepped down from the Infosys board last year, he has made select investments including Freshworld, a Bengaluru-based farm-to-fork fruit and vegetable delivery startup, and JetSynthesys, a digital and technology business firm.

He also invested in a Kerala-based business incubator called StartUp Village where he is the chief mentor.

In January last year, he had established Pratiksha Trust along with wife Sudha Gopalakrishnan that is also investing in brain research.

Uniphore's clients include Mashreq Bank in Dubai and EastWest Bank in Phillippines.