
A pack of well-funded startups - Decagon, Ada, Uniphore, Omilia - plus Amazon, Kore.ai, Capacity and Five9 are teaching software to resolve support tickets end to end. The prize is a customer service market worth hundreds of billions, and the humans who used to answer the phone.
The Swedish company behind a Loebner-winning chatbot now runs more than 17,000 AI agents for the likes of Telefonica and Swisscom - and finds itself at a crossroads as cash-rich rivals like Uniphore reshape the market it helped invent.
Umesh Sachdev is the CEO and co-founder of Uniphore, a Palo Alto-based business AI company he started in Chennai in 2008 with college friend Ravi Saraogi. What began as a multilingual speech recognition startup incubated at IIT Madras has grown into one of the largest AI-native enterprise SaaS companies in the world, serving over 2,500 customers and approaching $1 billion in bookings. In October 2025 Uniphore closed a $260 million Series F co-led by NVIDIA, AMD, Snowflake and Databricks.