One of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, has announced its first startup acquisition in India. Agara is an AI-powered support platform with operations in the United States and India.

Coinbase said this deal would bring Agara’s deep expertise in machine learning and natural language processing to the company’s engineering team.

“We plan to leverage Agara’s powerful Deep Learning and Conversational AI technology to automate and enhance our customer experience (CX) tools. Improving our CX remains a top priority for Coinbase-in the past few months we have increased our support staff headcount by 5x and announced that we’ll deliver 24/7 phone support and live messaging by end of the year. Through this acquisition, we’ll be able to provide our customers with new personalised, intelligent, and real-time support options,” said Manish Gupta, EVP-Engineering at Coinbase.

At the time, Gupta said that they would explore startup acquisitions and acquihires to accelerate their growth plans in the country.

“We have ambitious plans for this hub in the near future we want to hire hundreds of world-class engineers in the near team. This team of engineers will be complemented by equally high-quality product and design teams, as well as support functions such as recruiting and HR to build out a sustainable, well-rounded tech hub” Gupta said.

Founded in 2017, Agara counts RTP Global, UTEC Japan, Blume Ventures and Kleiner Perkins among its investors.

Coinbase has also backed domestic crypto exchanges such as CoinSwitch Kuber and CoinDCX both of which became a unicorn this year.

Coinbase had hired former Google Pay executive Pankaj Gupta to head its India development centre in 2021.