Artificial Intelligence-based startup, LimeChat, has raised $750,000 in seed funding led by pi Ventures and Stellaris Venture Partners.

The round also saw the participation from renowned angel investors including Flipkart CEO, Kalyan Krishnamurthy; Udaan co-founder, Sujeet Kumar; Livspace co-founder, Ramakant Sharma, and Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, Dilip Khandelwal. The startup had also raised a pre-seed round from Titan Capital early last year.

LimeChat was created in 2020. The firm helps direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses increase online sales interactions with consumers by selling directly via chat platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram.

The platform aims to provide customers with a personalised and engaging store-like shopping experience through a chat interface.

Founded by IIT Delhi alumni Nikhil Gupta and backed by Titan Capital Ventures, LimeChat is India's First level 3 Chatbot Technology and a leader in AI Conversational Commerce. With the integrations across CRM software, store management platform, payments network, and logistics platforms, the startup makes its customer-client interaction more effective.

"When we started, the word 'chatbot' was an overused term, and the value being delivered through them was very limited. We wanted to leverage our AI research background to develop cutting-edge conversational intelligence capable of delivering exceptional customer experiences,” said, Nikhil Gupta, Founder, LimeChat.

The startup is currently working with more than 25 direct-to-consumer brands across the fashion, beauty and cosmetics, and health and wellness verticals.
"Limiting our focus solely to the e-commerce vertical enabled us to engineer the tailormade contextual interactions which customers desire," said, co-founder Aniket Bajpai.

Shubham Sandeep, Principal, Pi Ventures, said, “At Pi, we back ventures solving large global problems using disruptive technology, and LimeChat fits the bill perfectly. Conversational commerce is taking off as evidenced by over 100 million business accounts across WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger."

“Assisted commerce is a massive market ripe for disruption. LimeChat's differentiated, Level 3 conversational AI enables any chat medium to become a sales channel,” said Alok Goyal, Partner, Stellaris Venture Partners.