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The Opportunity
Covid has thrown the world in disarray and it will never be the same again. Enterprises around the world are looking towards automation of cognitive tasks to help them be competitive or even survive. Agara has built some of the most forward-looking products that drive this digital transformation and looped in some of the biggest brands in the world as early customers.
You have the opportunity to be early members of the go-to-market team, lead it from the front and shape it as you go along. Being an early member comes with its own benefits – a wide-open berth to acquire new logos, being on the forefront of truly the next-generation of technology, industry-standard compensation, a competitive options package and the ability to work from your location.
This is a rapidly growing market and Agara is solidly positioned to take advantage. You can have pole position to capitalize on that.
Quick Introduction
Agara is building the AI-led organization of the future where machines undertake swift, intelligent and interactive conversations with people and create a great experience for all. Its patented artificial intelligence platform brings together the best of machine learning and ongoing internal research to create engaging virtual agents to understand, process and resolve customer issues without human assistance.
Agara works with some of the largest brands in the world helping them offer ever better experiences to their customers. We are backed by blue-chip investors from the US (Kleiner Perkins), Europe, Japan and India.
Agara ’s product & engineering teams are based in India (Bangalore) and we are now building our entire go-to-market machinery in the United States.
Longer Introduction
Agara is building the next generation of autonomous Conversational AI experiences over voice for global enterprises.
Almost 40% of all customer support requests in the US are over voice. This massive volume is managed by over 3.5m customer support agents located in the US who spend 60% of their time handling calls. However, the experience with customer support on phone continues to be abysmal with over 50% customers hanging up before their query is resolved.
Agara intends to turn this situation on its head.
Agara builds virtual voice agents that can field customer calls, ask questions, get information from company systems and provide resolutions - exactly the way agents do. We use proprietary machine learning / AI models that excel in understanding intents from speech, making decisions about the right manner to handle the query and talk the customer through the resolution.
Agara ’s voice bots are highly conversational. They can do all the things that people do - hold the line if the person is busy, repeat things, understand frustration and change their tone based on the context. They can also do some things that people cannot - understand all kinds of accents, respond instantly every single time and instantly handle a rising volume of calls.
Post Covid Context
While there was a short term disruption as everyone figured out a way to work from home, Covid-19 has been an overall positive for Agara .
Companies around the world are now looking aggressively at automation solutions for every part of their business. Customer contact centres, in particular, have suffered due to their inability to manage process-heavy setups while agents are unavailable or not as productive.
Digital transformation journeys have accelerated dramatically and Agara ’s focus on helping automate their voice conversations is an important component of that journey.
We are doubling down on our go to market efforts across key industries to capitalize on this key space.
The Company
Agara was founded in the summer of 2017. In the background of this birth was a coming of age of cutting-edge Deep Learning capabilities and Agara has been part of this wave of global applied AI companies who are bringing the tech to real-world problems. From the 4 members working out of a tiny coworking space, we are now a 35 strong team and have built several products, completed several deployments and proven their capability on several platforms.
Along the way, we have had the support of some great people and companies.
Kleiner Perkins came onboard as an early supporter and led our seed round. We also were able to sign up Procter & Gamble, the $40bn global giant, as an early customer to automate their email support.
Over the next couple of years, we had our heads down and solving the thorny problems facing us over email and voice. In 2019, we released our voice assisted customer support and on the back of it, raised new funds from Blume Ventures of India and RTP Global of Europe. By the end of the year, we had released the beta version of our fully autonomous voice agents.
2020 was a difficult year for everyone but not only did we weather the storm, we came out on top. The world is moving to greater automation and we see a big role for us. We also were able to execute a fund-raise despite fully remote discussions (announcement coming soon!).
2021 is our year of expansion. One that you will have a driving role in.
Key People
Abhimanyu is a founder and serves as the CEO. He brings to the table 14 years of experience in executive roles across multiple industries. In 2010, he founded his first startup in the travel space which brought about among the first marketplaces in international travel in India. Since then, he served as VP Product at Stayzilla, a VC backed Airbnb-clone. He spends 6-8 months on the road and will be working with all sales reps.
Arjun Maheswaran is a founder and serves as the CTO. For the past decade, he has been living and breathing machine learning. For 5+ years, he worked with Twitter in San Francisco, first in spam fighting and later with Cortex, their core Deep Learning team. He has built global-scale, real-time bots to identify, analyse and action upon tweets while creating and managing complex rules. He has also served stints at Cisco and Google. Arjun graduated Georgia Tech with a MS in Theoretical Computer Science.
Pankaj Gupta is a founder and an advisor. He serves as a Senior Director of Engineering at Google and has played a pivotal role in several of Google’s new age products including payments. He served a long stint at Twitter (emp # 25) and is credited with building the Who To Follow feature on the platform. Pankaj holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Dawn Varghese is a Director of Sales and the first senior sales hire. He comes to us after spending 12 years in Salesforce, IBM Watson and Infosys. He has spent his entire career in selling wide-scale, high technology products to large enterprises with complex decision making.
Responsibilities:
Define product strategy and roadmap. Identify customer and
market requirements and write use-case-driven requirements, focused on user-interaction workflows and security outcomes.
● Understand technologies within product area and articulate technological requirements. Identify risks early on and ask the right technical questions.
Impact customer experience, feature usability, success and team-level business goals.
● Drive feature discussions with customers, engineers, and partner teams and produce clear, concise documents like functional and technical specifications.
● Plan, reinforce, coordinate, and direct day-to-day operations around product delivery/customer support and professional service requirements.
● Assist sales team with representing roadmaps for newer markets.
● Provide a leadership presence to product and engineering teams providing direction and oversight.
● Act as product evangelist both internally and externally.
● Monitor and continuously improve operational efficiency and capacity.
● Define and monitor key performance metrics to ensure product success, and continuously optimise to deliver world class product experience.
You Must Have:
8 + years of experience in product development and/or product management (experience in managing growth in a product-centric company is a plus).
● History of achieving and maintaining strong operational excellence.
● Demonstrated ability to lead and manage multiple projects with a broad range of internal and external constituents.
Proven ability to think strategically about complex issues and develop thoughtful recommendations and action plans.
● Successful at presenting core business values clearly, concisely, and with conviction.
● Bachelor’s or Master's degree in engineering from
Halli Labs Private Limited ( Agara ) is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, pregnancy, veteran status, marital status, creed, status with regard to public assistance, genetic status or any other status protected by federal, state or local law.