Coinbase acquires India’s Agara to improve customer service
United States’ biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase, is currently working on developing its customer support while having expansion plans in India through acquiring a new startup.
On November 1, Coinbase made an official announcement reporting its acquisition of Agara, an artificial intelligence-powered support platform operating in India and the United States.
The latest acquisition by Coinbase is aimed at expanding and automating Coinbase’s customer service capabilities through the provision of a new machine learning and natural language processing tools into the crypto exchange’s engineering team. The new deal has also reconfirmed the company’s strategy of expanding its tech hub in India.
Agara’s acquisition of Coinbase costs anywhere between $40 million and $50 million, as published by TechCrunch on November 1, citing anonymous sources.
Agara and Coinbase are expected to close the deal late by this year.
Established in 2017, Agara is based on machine learning and natural language processing for improving user experience. Employing at least 40 people, Agara has been reported to have managed amassing some large customers, including cloud-based Salesforce and major e-commerce platform Shopify.
Coinbase’s Head of Operations in India, Pankaj Gupta, has said that Agara’s tech team would also join Coinbase as part of the acquisition. Gupta, one of the co-founders of Agara himself, expects that the purchase would prove to be “a win-win for Agara and Coinbase.”
Agara CEO and co-founder Abhimanyu have also noted that the firm has successfully integrated its tech stack into phone calls-based communication with the customer base as well. He explained that some of the “more complicated things” Agara does are around phone calls, so the team had been working “to automate much of” to enhance the support mechanism of the AI-based platform.
Coinbase has been struggling in the recent months to provide efficient customer support, and the latest move only comes as its effort to work on the same.
In mid-October, customers on Coinbase had made news for slamming the firm’s new phone support line while users claimed it was nothing more than a “joke.”
Coinbase was also previously under fire for bad customer service in August 2021 as thousands of its users had complained about hacked accounts and lost assets.
