Indian telecom services provider, Bharti Airtel, has announced an acquihire deal with AuthMe ID Services, a Bangalore based start-up focused on Artificial Intelligence based solutions.

As part of the deal, the core team of AuthMe will join Airtel and be a part of Airtel X Labs in Bangalore.

“We are rapidly scaling up Airtel X Labs, our digital innovation factory, and these new solutions will accelerate our journey towards rolling out intuitive digital products, particularly in vernacular languages, for our 430 mn plus customers,” said Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO, Bharti Airtel.

Airtel Acquires AI Startup AuthMe ID Services

Airtel has set up Airtel X Labs with the aim of driving cutting edge innovation in the areas of AI, IoT, AR and VR and is building a world-class team for the facility.

With 2 to 5 trillion records per day, over 10 billion calls per month and 10s of petabytes of data per month, Airtel is actively hiring data scientists in Bangalore. All this data could be used for network optimisation, smartphone characterisation, recommendation engines, chatbot customer support, customer profiling across multiple lines of businesses. Santanu Bhattacharya is the company’s Chief Data Scientist.

Airtel X Labs has already leased around 50 seats at Cowrks, in Bangalore. According to sources the company soon plans to increase this to 200 seats.

With the acquisition, Airtel now owns the intellectual property rights for two flagship solutions developed by AuthMe: