Sandfox Advisors is pleased to announce that it has advised leading conversational AI platform Active Intelligence (d.b.a. Active.ai) on its sale to Gupshup, a conversational services "unicorn" most recently valued at $1.4 billion. This represents Sandfox's second cross-border transaction in the past two years and also its second M&A transaction involving a conversational AI platform (following the sale of Sonar to Marchex in 2019).
Headquartered in Singapore, Active.ai serves banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) customers across 43 countries with a SaaS platform that helps clients engage with millions of consumers every month. Active.ai has enabled 300+ million user interactions via voice, video, and messaging, managed 30+ million service requests, and fulfilled 50+ million inquiries in aggregate. Clients include Royal Credit Union, CommFirst Federal Credit Union, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Tata Capital, IndusInd Bank, and HDFC Securities Ltd. The company has established partnerships with AWS, Microsoft, Infosys (Finacle), TCS, Finastra, EY, PwC, and Accenture.
Active.ai was founded in 2016 by Ravi Shankar, Parikshit Paspulati, and Shankar Narayannan. The company rapidly grew to more than 100 employees and established a presence in Singapore, India, and the U.S. before being acquired by Gupshup.
Gupshup is a leading conversational messaging platform, powering 7+ billion messages per month. Thousands of businesses in emerging markets use Gupshup to build conversational experiences across marketing, sales and support. Gupshup’s carrier-grade platform provides a single messaging API for 30+ channels, a rich conversational experience-building tool kit for any use case and a network of emerging market partnerships across messaging channels, device manufacturers, ISVs and operators. The company is present across the world in regions like India, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the United States.
Ravi Shankar, CEO of Active.ai, commented, “We are excited to partner with Gupshup to help shape the future of conversational engagement in the financial services space.”
Sandfox Advisors, with a team led by Matei Sanders and Zach Madden, served as the exclusive financial advisor to Active.ai.