Business-to-consumer (B2C) firm Gupshup, which works in conversational messaging to help businesses talk to customers, is acquiring Active.Ai, which provides conversational AI-powered digital financial services, a press release said.
Active.Ai works with banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) customers. The press release noted that Active.Ai has worked in various ways with voice, video and messaging.
The acquisition will reportedly help Gupshup in its work in retail banking, business banking, credit unions, capital markets and insurance.
“Using Conversational AI, Gupshup is focused on helping businesses … engage with consumers in a natural and contextual manner. Active.Ai’s robust CBaaS platform adds more vertical depth to our product stack,” said Beerud Sheth, co-founder and CEO of Gupshup.
Meanwhile, Active.Ai CEO and co-founder Ravi Shankar said B2C engagement “that combines advanced natural language processing with deep enterprise connectivity is essential.”
Read more: Gupshup Unveils WhatsApp-Based eCommerce Tool
PYMNTS wrote that last December, Gupshup rolled out a new service letting businesses make digital storefronts on WhatsApp.
The company said this was based on the commerce capability that was new at the time with WhatsApp.
Gupshup, therefore, would be able to help a company manage the whole buying experience via WhatsApp.
Gupshup also said this would use the 1-click Bill Pay feature, allowing businesses connect payments on WhatsApp or other such platforms. This will all allow companies to make a product catalog, talk with customers on AI-fueled chatbots and pay for things.
Apple debuted its lower-cost smartphone, the iPhone 16e, Wednesday (Feb. 19), saying the product’s price starts at $599.
“We’re so excited for iPhone 16e to complete the lineup as a powerful, more affordable option to bring the iPhone experience to even more people,” Kaiann Drance, vice president of worldwide iPhone product marketing at Apple, said in a Wednesday press release.
The new model joins a smartphone lineup that includes the iPhone 15 starting at $699, the iPhone 16 starting at $799 and the iPhone 16 Pro starting at $999, according to the Apple website.
The iPhone 16e is “built for Apple Intelligence,” the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) offering, according to the release.
The smartphone also offers Apple’s A18 chip, the Apple C1 cellular modem, a 48MP Fusion camera system and a 6.1-inch display, the release said.
The Big Tech firm will accept pre-orders for the iPhone 16e in 59 countries and regions beginning Friday (Feb. 21) and will make the phone available beginning Feb. 28, per the release.
The new smartphone will cost $170 more than the iPhone SE that it replaces, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
It also marks the biggest change in the history of the low-end iPhones that were introduced in 2016 and have not been updated in nearly three years, according to the report.
The company reported in January that during the fourth quarter — the first quarter in which it offered the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence — the iPhone 16 models performed stronger in markets where the AI features were available.
Apple reported a record number of iPhone upgraders during the quarter, with the iPhone 16 family outperforming the iPhone 15 family since launch. During a January earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook attributed this trend to a strong desire among existing customers to adopt the latest technology, with Apple Intelligence being a key factor.
The company’s installed base of active devices reached a record high of 2.35 billion during the quarter.
When Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence in September, it said the suite of AI-powered features integrates deeply into the company’s ecosystem, leveraging the technology to perform tasks ranging from text refinement to image manipulation, all while prioritizing user privacy.