Uniphore Software Systems, a global conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technology company with customers in the U.S. and Asia, is eyeing $100 million revenue in three years with the objective of becoming an unicorn (a firm with more than $1 billion in value).
The company, which was incubated in IIT Madras 10 years ago, reported a 300% growth last year and this rate of growth would continue for many more years, a top executive said.
“I always want to remain focused on my team to be heads down and deliver,” Umesh Sachdev, co-founder and CEO, Uniphore Software Systems, said in an interview. “We want to get to the $100 million revenue run rate in the next three years. If we reach there, from the valuation perspective, we will be more than a unicorn,” he said.
Speaking about the firm, John Chambers, chairman emeritus, Cisco, who had also invested in Uniphore said, “The way they are growing, they will grow to $100 million in the next three years. At that rate, it is very easy for them to become a unicorn quickly. It will be the first enterprise software company located in India to ever hit that number and go beyond that.”
Scaling up business
The company is planning to scale up fast around the world. “We don’t want to be a shallow player in each market. Every county we will go to, we want to be number one or number two in that market,” Mr. Sachdev said.
After establishing itself in Japan and Korea, Australia and New Zealand and the U.S., the company would focus on growing its business in Europe followed by emerging markets such as Latin America, Africa and West Asia.Middle East.
“Over the next four to six years there will be tremendous room for growth geographically, and we will go deep in the markets we will be in and drive growth from there,” he added.
“We feel confident that given that there is so much to do, the 300% growth rate we are talking about can be sustained for the next three to four years,” he said.
The company is into a sector that would undergo massive people impact and massive commercial impact. It is transforming the current call centre business which is estimated at $350 billion.
“In the next five to seven years, most of the large call centre companies will potentially be not around because of this technology change. We are getting machines to understand human voice and talk to people and that is the opportunity we are after,” he said.