SUMMARY
The acquisition, valued at $16.5 Mn (around INR 137.7 Cr) will involve acquiring shares from existing shareholders and subscribing to new equity capital
Aurionpro aims to integrate Arya.ai’s AI cloud platform with its suite of offerings to create a leading enterprise AI platform for financial institutions across the globe
Mumbai-based technology solutions company Aurionpro Solutions is set to acquire 67% stake in banking and insurance focused PaaS startup Arya.ai in an all-cash deal.
The acquisition, valued at $16.5 Mn (around INR 137.7 Cr) will involve acquiring shares from existing shareholders and subscribing to new equity capital.
Aurionpro aims to integrate Arya.ai’s AI cloud platform with its suite of offerings to create a leading enterprise AI platform for financial institutions across the globe.
This collaboration aims to accelerate the realisation of true business value from Enterprise AI by leveraging Arya.ai’s expertise in AI solutions and comprehensive governance tools, the company said in a statement.
Ashish Rai, chief executive of Aurionpro Solutions, said, “ We are going through probably the most significant platform shift in the industry, and we are incredibly excited about working with Arya.ai and our wider ecosystem partners to build out the leading enterprise AI platform, for the financial industry worldwide.”
“Making AI acceptable and scalable in the financial industry is extremely different and hard. It is relatively easy to use a new AI technique like MLPs or self-supervised learning system and deploy the model. But to make it acceptable in a highly regulated industry like Banking or Insurance, it needs to be stable, reliable, explainable, auditable, compliant, and safe to use,” said Vinay Kumar, CEO and founder of Arya.ai.
“Together with Aurionpro, we are going to build a new generation of enterprise AI software for banks and Insurers that truly embed AI, augmenting a task or Autonomous Agents that can take over entire transactions”.
Founded in 2013 by Kumar and Deekshith Marla, Arya.ai offers a platform as a solution (PaaS) for BFSI.
The startup primarily has three components – Arya API (ML models specialised for BFSIs), Libra–Fune (for tuning as a service platform offering multiple SOTA ML models for various tasks in BFSI) and AryaXAI (a soon-to-be-launched ML observability and alignment tool to provide off the shelf ‘AI’ governance for mission-critical ‘AI’).
It also claims to have been publishing impactful IP and producing its research into products for the BFSI space across deep learning, explainable AI, model alignment and computer vision.
Meanwhile, Aurionpro Solutions is a technology solutions company catering to the needs of the banking, mobility, payments, and government sectors. It has about 2,300 employees across its offices in India and globally.
The development comes around the heel of the slump in mergers and acquisitions in the Indian startup ecosystem from over 200 deals in 2022 to 123 deals in 2023 due to the ongoing funding winter.
However, some companies have entered the Indian SaaS ecosystem through acquisitions lately.
For instance, in February, Fintech SaaS startup Signzy acquired fraud risk management (FRM) solutions provider Difenz in a cash and equity deal for $5 Mn. In December last year, ChrysCapital acquired 75% stakes in B2B SaaS platform ProHance Analytics for an undisclosed amount.
