Shishir Modi

Co-founder

niki.ai

Over 2 billion people in the world use messaging apps today. The number is set to grow exponentially with growing internet usage and smartphone penetration. Also, research shows that messaging apps are the most used ones among all the other apps. If one could take care of all the important payments and bookings right from an interface he or she is used to, the experience can be unbeatable. We did extensive research around it and came up with the idea.

Started in May 2015, Niki.ai envisions to provide one shop for everything commerce. Niki is an AI bot who converses to help you shop for products and services and makes the whole journey from discovery to transaction fast, convenient and extremely simple, while keeping it feel natural. Niki currently provides a wide array of services to over 400,000 consumers. The services covers a wide spectrum ranging from utility services like recharge and bill payments, travel services like cabs, local search and deals, buses and hotels, food ordering, entertainment services like movies and events, home services like laundry to name a few. It’s a channel partnership model that we work on. We essentially get a commission for every order that we generate for our vendors (BookMyShow for movies, Nearbuy for local deals, Redbus & Ticketgoose for bus tickets and more), who do the fulfillment.

To the businesses, Niki.ai provides a plug and play technology in the form of Niki Chatbot Software Development Kit that can be easily integrated on their platform to sell smart with an AI. The SDK empowers the brand to provide an integrated service marketplace for their users through conversational commerce on their mobile and web apps. Thus, Niki helps businesses engage, retain and monetise their customer base. The Niki Software Development Kit (SDK) is mere 1mb in size, and can be integrated with a development effort of 30 minutes and 10 lines of code. For brands, it’s much simple since we will replicate the entire transactional experience and provide them in form of a SDK. Partnerships with OEMs like Zen & Zopo, digital wallets like Oxigen and India’s top private bank HDFC, have proven to be successful. We recently published a success story with HDFC Bank’s OnChat bot on witnessing exponential growth month-on-month.

Niki is the first of its kind completely automated AI powered bot which gives personalized recommendations for products and services with ZERO manual intervention. This enables the bot to take the consumers through the ordering process in the most intuitive and personalized way. When most apps refuse to work or slow down their process on 2G, Niki works seamlessly. Making transactions on Niki is as easy as chatting with a friend.

We plan to integrate many more services on our platform so that for most of the needs that a user may have, Niki is the first thing that strikes his mind. We are already working on some very interesting and innovative features which will take the ordering experience to next level. Currently, multilingual support and voice-recognition are in the making. You can soon also expect Niki to be your insurance agent and a stock broker. An average Indian user may not be very comfortable with English as a language, and in an attempt to eradicate all the friction by removing the language barrier as well, we think we’ll be able to solve yet another pain point.