Cheerio AI, an AI-powered customer engagement platform, has raised Rs 8 crore in a seed funding round led by Artha Venture Fund through its Artha Venture Fund II.
The funding round also saw participation from Hyderabad Angels, TiE Angels, LetsVenture and Invention Engine, along with several angel investors including Arjun Vaidya, Anand Shahni of WedMeGood, Vivek Mathur (formerly of Elevation Capital), Ajeet Khurana, and early customers such as Habuild and Nitin Verma from InstaAstro.
The capital raised will be deployed to strengthen the company’s AI capabilities, including the development of a proprietary small-model large language model (LLM) for advertisement generation. The startup also plans to expand its platform beyond messaging into voice and video communication while enhancing automation features and building enterprise-grade infrastructure.
Founded by Nishant Das, Avinash and Priam, Cheerio AI offers an artificial intelligence-based customer engagement platform designed to help enterprises improve the customer acquisition cost to lifetime value (CAC-to-LTV) ratio. The system integrates marketing, support and sales workflows across multiple communication channels such as WhatsApp, email, SMS, social messaging and in-app interactions.
Sharing his views on the funding announcement, Nishant Das, Co-founder at Cheerio AI, said, “Avinash, Priam, and I are thrilled to partner with Artha and our co-investors. This investment is a strong validation of our vision and will enable us to significantly deepen our AI-driven automation capabilities while accelerating our expansion into the enterprise segment. At Cheerio AI, we envision a future where businesses operate with just three employees – the business founder, the technology founder, and Cheerio AI. This funding is a crucial step toward making that vision a reality.”
Commenting on the investment, Anirudh A. Damani, Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund, said, “Our decision to invest in Cheerio AI is anchored in strong conviction around the long-term opportunity this team is building toward. As enterprises operate across an increasingly complex set of digital channels, customer retention and lifetime value optimization have become mission-critical. Cheerio’s AI-native approach to unifying and orchestrating customer engagement positions it well to become a category-defining platform in this space.
This round carried strong ecosystem validation from us. The opportunity was referred by one of our LPs, and after we shared it with the founders in our portfolio for our feedback, they too chose to invest alongside us! When experienced operators commit their own capital, it reinforces both founder quality and execution depth. That conviction mattered.”
According to the company, Cheerio AI has recorded revenue growth of 450 percent year-on-year over the past two years. The startup currently works with more than 150 enterprise customers across six industries and estimates that its retention-focused automation tools have helped generate over Rs 500 crore in additional revenue for clients.
Looking ahead, the company plans to expand its team across engineering, artificial intelligence, enterprise sales and customer success over the next six months as it prepares for international expansion.
