Mezi, a leading chatbot shopping app has received funding of $9million in Series A Round from investors. Investors in this round included previous investor Nexus Venture Partners and new investors Saama Capital and American Express Ventures. Also, Amit Singhal, former SVP and Head of Google Search, and Gokul Rajaram, Product Engineering Lead at Square, will be joining in as angel investors.
The company plans to use this investment to back the company’s growth and accelerate Mezi’s product and artificial intelligence (AI) technology development around conversational commerce, AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and machine learning.
Mezi is a personal shopping assistant. The way Mezi works is you just need to send a message to Mezi when you want to shop something and then its Mezi’s responsibility to carry out a thorough research and present you the various available options. Mezi helps you till the final process of placing the order. All this is made possible by Mezi as it is powered by the world’s smartest chatbots and human guided experts. Yes Mezi is a perfect combination of two worlds – human expertise and artificial intelligence.
A perfect blend of artificial intelligence and human expertise, allows Mezi to understand the shopping preferences of its users and hence provide a seamless, personalized shopping experience over messaging. Mezi aims at simplifying the mobile shopping experience by sifting through thousands of potential choices based on user price points, preferences, and learned habits and then making suggestions.
The idea behind this app is to provide an experience which is very similar to shopping with your best friend by way of chatting and having intelligent and humanistic conversations. Mezi bots are able to understand a wide range of requests and can even mimic speech patterns by learning from user conversations enabled through consciousness design and artificial intelligence. These Mezi bots can manage common queries with respect to travel and flower requests 80 per cent of the times from end-to-end without any human intervention and within two-minutes of time. The result is a rapid-fire conversational experience that makes them indistinguishable from human assistants.
Mezi, available on the iOS App Store and SMS, has been successful in providing a wonderful experience to its users and this is evident from the fact that around 40% of its users return on a monthly basis to shop with Mezi. From the time of its launch, December 2015, Mezi has exchanged one million messages till date making it a go-to daily shopping companion for its users. 25% of all purchases made through Mezi are for travel bookings, 21% for fashion items, and 15% for gifts for friends and family.
“With Mezi, we have created the most advanced shopping bots that can anticipate our users’ needs and wants by harnessing the latest advances in artificial intelligence and consciousness design. We look forward to continuing to provide a shopping experience that delights and amazes our users with these world-class investors behind us,” commented Mezi Co-founder and CEO, Swapnil Shinde.
Mezi uses proprietary technology platforms, Smart Connect and Smart Assist which are built using artificial intelligence, deep learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). These technologies help to streamline intent detection, automatic replies, expert workflows, reduce response times, and provide personalized product recommendations.
“Mezi has created an intuitive platform that helps consumers unlock something we all want – a personal assistant in the palm of your hand, whether you need to book travel, purchase a gift or buy a new wardrobe,” said Rohit Bodas, Partner, American Express Ventures.
“Our investment in Mezi reflects our belief in their core technology and their ability to shatter the vending-machine experience of past bots and provide a clearly superior product that delivers a truly personal experience for every user.” commented Ash Lilani, Managing Partner and Co-Founder Saama Capital.
“Mezi elevates AI to the next level by uniting human intelligence with machine intelligence that shatters today’s current standard,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners.
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