Cheerio AI, an AI-powered customer engagement platform, has raised ₹8 crore in a seed funding round led by Artha Venture Fund through its second fund, Artha Venture Fund II (AVF II). Additionally, the round witnessed participation from Hyderabad Angels, TiE Angels, LetsVenture, and Invention Engine.
Moreover, several notable angel investors joined the round, including Arjun Vaidya, Anand Shahni of WedMeGood, Vivek Mathur, formerly of Elevation Capital, and Ajeet Khurana. In addition, the company’s early customers, such as Habuild and Nitin Verma from InstaAstro, also participated in the investment round.
The company plans to deploy the fresh capital to develop advanced multimodal AI capabilities. Specifically, the startup will focus on building a proprietary small-model large language model (LLM) designed for advertising content generation. Furthermore, Cheerio AI aims to expand its platform beyond messaging and introduce voice and video engagement capabilities.
At the same time, the company will accelerate the development of AI-powered automation tools and strengthen enterprise-grade infrastructure. Consequently, these improvements will enable businesses to achieve faster growth, higher customer engagement, and stronger return on investment while maintaining robust security and compliance standards.
Cheerio AI has also demonstrated strong business growth. In fact, the company’s revenue has grown by approximately 450 percent year-over-year during the past two years.
Additionally, the startup plans to expand its workforce over the next six months by hiring talent across engineering, artificial intelligence research, enterprise sales, and customer success teams. Through these hires, the company aims to support rapid scaling and expand its presence in global markets.
Speaking on the 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.”
Meanwhile, investors also expressed strong confidence in the startup’s long-term potential in the AI-driven customer engagement market.
“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,” said Anirudh A. Damani, Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund.
“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.”
Cheerio AI differentiates itself from conventional customer engagement tools by offering a unified platform that combines omnichannel communication, workflow automation, and applied artificial intelligence capabilities.
As a result, the platform enables non-technical teams to automate marketing and engagement workflows, reduce manual effort, improve customer interactions, and deliver higher return on investment at scale.
By expanding into multimodal AI capabilities such as voice, video, and proprietary LLM-powered ad generation, the startup aims to redefine how businesses interact with customers across digital channels. With rapid revenue growth, strong investor backing, and plans for global expansion, Cheerio AI is positioning itself as a next-generation AI automation platform for modern enterprises.
