Articbot is the latest Indian firm to favour the Middle East route for expansion overseas.
Articbot, an Indian start-up operating a multi-lingual chatbot platform based on conversational artificial intelligence (AI), is set to establish its first overseas office in Bahrain.
The Indian venture, which helps businesses to automate customer support in multiple languages, is also in advanced discussions with a leading Saudi Arabian petrochemical company for a deal to handle its customer conversational data services.
“We are almost in the final stage of the discussions with a Saudi Arabia-based company which is a leading player in the petrochemical sector for partnering with our AI-based conversational data handling services,” Rahul VP, co-founder and CEO of Articbot, told Arabian Business.
Rahul, however, declined to disclose the name of the Saudi company or the value of the project because of the non-disclosure agreement with the company.
Articbot is the latest to join a long list of Indian companies such as FreshToHome, Strava Technologies, Curefit, Tanishq and Dabur to choose the Middle East route for its international expansion.
Rahul said Articbot had planned to open the office in Bahrain earlier this year but that was postponed because of the Covid pandemic.
“Now we are looking at an end of this year or early next year opening for the office in Bahrain,” he said.
Articbot, which was selected for the Flat6 Labs Bahrain accelerator programme last year, has already bagged two projects in Bahrain – one with a financial institution and the other, a software company.
“We are also in discussions with some other companies in the Gulf region. The progress of these are taking time because of the current pandemic situation,” he said.
Articbot, set up by Rahul along with Rijin Ramesh in 2017, has designed and developed a machine-learning, AI-based platform to revolutionise the communication between enterprises and their customers.
“With our AI-powered chatbot, businesses can support their customers through websites, mobile applications and various social messaging applications. It also helps enterprises to significantly reduce the call centre volume and improve the users’ satisfaction rate,” Rahul said.
Rahul also revealed that Articbot is currently in the process of expanding its product offering with an add on product called Dashfrugal.
“This is also another SaaS (software as a service) product built for B2B companies to manage their customer and internal sales team’s product training. We launched the beta version of this product in mid September and within four weeks of launch we got more than 60 enterprises around the world using the product to effectively manage their product training,” he added.
