India-based technology firm Aurionpro Solutions Limited has announced the strategic acquisition of Mumbai-based banking and insurance focused platform-as-a-service (PaaS) startup Arya.ai at $16.5 million.

Aurionpro said in a statement on last Friday that with Arya.ai, Aurionpro will significantly enhance its portfolio of enterprise fintech offerings to expedite the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) that is responsible, accurate, and auditable, aligning strongly with the rapidly evolving demands of banks and insurers.

Under the terms of the agreement, Aurionpro Solutions Ltd. will acquire a majority stake (67 percent) in Arya.ai.

This acquisition will bring products and expertise in AI, deep learning, intelligent automation, PaaS, autonomous AI platforms, and tailored industry solutions, to complement and strengthen Aurionpro’s existing industry leading portfolio.

It is noted that Arya.ai Enterprise AI solutions are used by 100+ banks and insurers across Asia.

The transaction comprises acquisition of shares held by the existing shareholders and subscription of new equity capital in the company. This will be an all-cash deal.

The aggregate investment including secondary acquisition and fund infusion is approximately $16.5 million.

By integrating Arya.ai’s cutting-edge AI cloud platform, with Aurionpro’s comprehensive suite of offerings, the company intends to create an industry leading Enterprise AI platform sharply focused on creating value for financial institutions globally.

It is noted that leveraging Arya.ai’s expertise in AI solutions and comprehensive governance tools will greatly accelerate Aurionpro’s vision of creating the next generation of highly differentiated software that leads the industry in helping financial Institutions realize true business value from Enterprise AI.

“The acquisition of Arya.ai brings together Aurionpro’s portfolio of industry leading enterprise software with one of the most mature Enterprise AI platforms focused on the needs of banks and insurers,

“It also brings together probably the most talented enterprise focused AI/ML team in Asia with Aurionpro’s deep domain expertise and strengths to build highly differentiated Enterprise software,” said Ashish Rai, Chief Executive Officer of Aurionpro Solutions.

“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,” he added.

Vinay Kumar, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Arya.ai, said that making AI acceptable and scalable in financial industry is extremely different and hard.

“It is relatively easy to use a new AI technique like multi layer perceptron (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,” he explained.

According to him, the firm’s decade long experience in building tools/platform for deep learning helped them to build a truly verticalized AI operating system for banking and insurance.

“We’ve been growing 3 times year on year in the last couple of years and have been profitable,

“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,” he added.

Founded in 2013 by Vinay Kumar Sankarapu and Deekshith Marla from IIT Bombay, Arya.ai has been one of the first ‘AI’ startups to use deep learning and deploy in enterprises.

Arya.ai’s PaaS offering for banking, financial services and insurance (BFSIs) primarily has three components: Arya API – models-as-a-service and DIY platform offering more than 80+ fine-tuned machine learning (ML) models specialized for BFSIs; Libra – fine-tuning as a service platform offering multiple SOTA ML models that are optimized 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’.

Today, Arya.ai works with more than 100+ clients in BFSIs across the globe with major concentration in India and South-East Asia.

With a core team of researchers and data scientists, Arya.ai has been publishing extremely high impactful intellectual property (IP) and productizing its world class research into products for BFSI space in the areas of deep learning, explainable AI, ,odel alignment and computer vision.

Aurionpro is an advanced technology solutions company catering to the needs of the banking, mobility, payments, and government sectors.

It converges multiple technology solutions under a single umbrella – advanced and accelerated platform-led transformation (ADAPT) to the ‘New Digital World’.

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