Coinbase has acquired an Indian startup Agara to improve its customer support.
It has been reported that Coinbase officially announced Tuesday the acquisition of Agara, an artificial intelligence-enabled support platform with operations in India and the United States.
However, the acquisition aims to expand and automate Coinbase’s customer service capabilities by providing new machine learning and natural language processing tools to Coinbase’s engineering team. The deal also reconfirms the company’s strategy to expand its tech hub in India.
The report said that the acquisition of Agara will cost Coinbase between $40 million and $50 million. The two firms reportedly expect to close the deal later this year.
Likewise, Agara works on machine learning and natural language processing to improve user experience. Employing around 40 people, Agara has reportedly managed to amass some large customers, including cloud-based software company Salesforce and major e-commerce company Shopify.
Pankaj Gupta, the Head of Operations at Coinbase in India, said that Agara’s tech team will join Coinbase as part of the acquisition. Gupta, a co-founder of Agara himself, expects the purchase to be a win-win for Agara and Coinbase.
He added:
“It’s amazing to see my worlds collide here with Agara, a startup I co-founded in early 2017 but later left to join Google.”
Abhimanyu, the co-founder and CEO of Agara, said that the company has been able to integrate its tech stack into phone calls-based communication with customers as well.
Thus, he concluded:
“Some of the more complicated things we do are around phone calls. We have been working to automate much of, if not all, of the support that happens through phone calls.”
Source: Cointelegraph