Two engineering students from Delhi walked into IIT Madras with a plan to become entrepreneurs and a professor to convince. They were Umesh Sachdev and Ravi Saraogi, and the professor was Ashok Jhunjhunwala, whose incubator on the campus took them in. The year was 2008.
The pair had met at engineering college in Noida, and had first built a mobile-theft security product. Their first customers in India, among them MTNL and BSNL, were a start. Business Standard later reported that even those wins made the founders realise it would take more than this for the company to scale. A National Research Development Corporation grant of $100,000 helped them get going.
The pair had met at engineering college in Noida, and had first built a mobile-theft security product.
The product that stuck was speech. Uniphore built software that listens to a customer call, recognises the language and turns it into data. India is a hard test for that: many languages, many accents, noisy lines. In 2014 it launched its first flagship products, auMina, Akeira and amVoice. By 2016 it supported over 70 languages and had opened in Singapore.
A pivot followed in 2015. Uniphore stopped charging licence fees and moved to a subscription model. The same year Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of Infosys, led its Series A, and IDG Ventures followed. In 2017 John Chambers, the former Cisco chief, led the Series B. Sachdev has said that Chambers pushed him to think beyond valuation and focus on building a team.
The next step was moving the centre of gravity to California. Palo Alto became the headquarters, with the customer base shifting to large global enterprises: the company counts JPMorgan Chase, DHL, UPS, Verizon and Vodafone among them. A $51 million Series C came in 2019, $140 million in 2021, and in February 2022 a $400 million Series E led by NEA at a $2.5 billion valuation.
Growth became acquisition-led. Emotion Research Lab, Jacada, Red Box, Hexagone, then ActionIQ, Infoworks and Orby AI. In June 2025 it launched a Business AI Cloud, and in October 2025 raised $260 million more, with Nvidia, AMD, Snowflake and Databricks among the investors, at a reported $2.5 billion.
The pattern is useful. Uniphore started with a narrow technical skill, speech recognition in Indian languages, and kept moving it toward where the money was. For a founder, the lesson is that the product that wins your first customers may not be the one that builds the company. Be ready to follow the market, even across an ocean.