Niki

Market position

Niki was among the early entrants in India's chatbot and conversational commerce segment, alongside Haptik, Lookup and Tapzo. Of that cohort, Haptik was acquired by Reliance in a deal reported at over $100 million, Tapzo became part of Amazon in 2018, and Lookup was sold to NowFloats; Niki did not find a buyer and wound down. Total disclosed funding was around $6 million.

Management positioned Niki as India's first and only fully automated AI bot handling end-to-end digital transactions without human intervention, with a single, stable chat interface replacing multiple apps and changing UIs, and machine learning improving the experience over repeated interactions. The company cited high repeat usage rates and awards from Infosys Finacle, HDFC Bank's Digital Innovation Summit, the India Fintech Awards 2017 and the AWS Mobility Awards.

Technology

An AI-powered chatbot acting as an intelligent personal assistant, built on natural language processing and machine learning to interpret how Indian users chat, map utterances to products and services, and generate recommendations and complete transactions. The system was described as fully automated with no human intervention, and later supported voice commands in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and English. The Niki SDK allowed integration into web, iOS and Android products with roughly half an hour of development effort.

Go-to-market

Distribution combined a direct consumer app (Android, later iOS and Facebook Messenger) with embedded distribution through the Niki SDK, which partners such as HDFC Bank, Federal Bank, Intex and Karbonn integrated into their own platforms. Merchant partnerships with travel, ticketing and mobility providers supplied the supply side of the marketplace.

Indian smartphone users accustomed to messaging apps, including first-time internet users, plus enterprise partners such as banks and handset makers that embedded the Niki SDK for their own customers.

Geography

Headquartered in Bangalore (Bengaluru), Karnataka, with a single location as of 2018 and service coverage across India. As of 2018 the company described itself as pan-India with no immediate international plans; in February 2021 it announced overseas expansion plans.

History

Founded in 2015 in Udaipur and formerly known as zabbed, the company launched its Android app in a limited beta in June 2015 and released it publicly at YourStory's TechSparks 2015. It raised undisclosed seed funding from Unilazer Ventures in October 2015, followed by seed backing from Ratan Tata in May 2016 and a $2 million Series A in 2017 involving SAP.iO, existing investors and US- and Germany-based investors. The company expanded beyond Android to Facebook Messenger and iOS, signed partnerships with LazyPay (August 2017) and Infosys Finacle (September 2017), and moved into voice-based transactions across Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and English. In February 2021 it announced overseas expansion plans and reportedly sought to raise $50 million. Reports in November 2021 said the company had discontinued services and was shutting down, having laid off most staff and failed to secure an acquisition.

Risks & controversies

The company reported widening losses, with FY20 expenditure of Rs 27.04 crore against Rs 3.19 crore of operating revenue and losses of Rs 23.42 crore, and had not filed FY21 accounts at the time of the shutdown reports. Shutdown coverage attributed the closure to a lack of funds, following layoffs of most employees and unsuccessful acquisition talks. User commentary also referenced promotional code exploitation in 2019 that reportedly caused losses, and complaints about convenience fees and slow customer support.