Haptik app: A mobile personal assistant that brings information at your fingertips

In this mobile era, most people cannot imagine leaving their homes without a phone. Over the years, our phone usage pattern has also changed and we not only use it to keep in touch with others but also for quick information access. There are several apps like Path talk, Assist.ly that aim at offering information about day-to-day needs with local businesses. In India too, we’ve witnessed this shift and there are apps trying to help users get instant information, and one such app is Haptik ( Android and iOS). Both apps have 4.5+ rating and according to the company it been growing at an aggressive 30% month on month. Haptik is a mobile personal assistant service that aims to solve user issues using the messaging channel of communication. Be it flight options or customer support for your bank, the service will help users get all the required details within minutes. Users need to simply send an SMS with their query and Haptik will respond within five minutes. Haptik has recorded over ​9​00,000 chats from the time it has launched last year and the company has grown 10 times in the past six months with over 50,000 users accessing the app at least once a month.  Haptik is managed by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev. Currently, Haptik has 125 experts handling chats and expects the number to grow to 180 by the end of next month. Vaish has a BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and helped set up Flurry (later acquired by Yahoo), a mobile analytics and advertising solutions, in India. He later went on to co-found Flat.to, which was acquired by CommonFloor. “If you are on the go, finding information for products and services is a pain. It requires you to open up a bunch of Google links on a small screen, or have to call the company and we all are aware of the frustrations of dealing with call center support. That’s how we primarily came up with the idea,” Aakrit Vaish, CEO and co-founder, Haptik tells us. Rajdev is the CTO at Haptik and a techie who loves to build things. He is widely popular as the main man behind developing the hit app Snake Classic in 2010. Haptik hasn’t been incubated and both the founders financed the company for the first year. After about 12 months, they raised $1.1 million through venture capital financing, and are looking to raise another round in the next three months. Talking about growth, both aim at making Haptik a daily use product. Meanwhile, they are also experimenting two revenue streams - a customer support engagement channel for brand and making a commision on influencing purchases. Its current partners include Amazon, Freecharge, among others. In future, Haptik also plans to provide alerts, transaction confirmations, targeted offers, and so on. The company is also building an API that can be used in other apps. The company is currently looking to grow in numbers, aiming for a million monthly active users by the end of this year.