Started in a small room in a house in Udaipur, Artificial intelligence chat bot Niki.ai has been attracting wide spread acknowledgement. Recently covered in Business Standard’s startup corner, the startup has received funding from Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures and also from Ratan Tata.

Recharging your phone, bill payments, ordering food, cab booking or even laundry services online would require you to install a multitude of applications on the mobile phone. Artificial intelligence (AI) platform Niki.ai aims to bring all these services on one platform.

Sachin Jaiswal, co-founder and chief executive officer of Niki.ai said that they started working on the idea in January 2015 from a small room in a house in Udaipur. All the four co-founders, Nitin Babel (chief operating officer), Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi (chief technology officer) and Shishir Modi (chief managing officer), are engineers.

How it works Once Niki application is downloaded on your mobile, it can be used to make multiple types of transactions. Services available include phone recharge, bill payments, cab booking, food orders (from Burger King) and laundry services.

Business model For each order, they get commissions. Jaiswal said they did a proof of concept in food so they could understand how the customer would look at it. Now the idea is to tie-up with likes of Swiggy or Zomato to offer all the local restaurants, according to him. Niki operates on a channel partnership model. So, for every fulfilled order for any business, they get a revenue split, which is between two per cent to 10 per cent of the total transaction.

Sourced from: Business Standard