AI Startup Giga Secures $61M to Scale Emotionally Intelligent Support Agents

Giga, the AI company redefining how people interact with customer support, today announced it has raised a $61 million Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and Nexus Venture Partners.

The funding will accelerate Giga’s growth as it continues to outperform global incumbents and emerges as the product of choice for complex enterprise support automation. Giga will grow its technical team, accelerate go-to-market motion, and scale deployments with the world’s largest enterprises.

Founded by IIT Kharagpur graduates and Forbes 30 Under 30 honorees Varun Vummadi (CEO) and Esha Manideep (CTO), Giga is redefining how companies scale high quality support. The platform enables companies to deploy emotionally intelligent agents that can reason, act, and resolve issues — all in real time.

"What excites me most about Giga is that it's not just building a best-in-class support bot—it’s that the team is building a foundational AI infrastructure layer for customer voice,” said Satish Dharmaraj, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. “This is one of our largest early stage investments to date because we believe deeply in both the strength of the product to reshape the world of customer support and the pace of execution from the Giga team.”

Abhishek Sharma, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, added,

Giga is leading a paradigm shift in enterprise support with AI. Their category‑leading platform helps the biggest enterprises in the world to achiecompanies move from human and outsourced support to scalable, software‑driven AI—boosting efficiency, quality, and compliance. Varun, Esha, and the team are building one of the most transformational AI companies of our time, and it’s been a privilege for Nexus to be part of their journey since the early days.

Rather than bolting together prebuilt scripts or APIs, Giga has engineered a unified platform for real-time automation — purpose-built for scale, precision, and emotional fluency. Giga’s AI agents are logical, perceptive, emotionally aware, and always improving. And their breakthrough is context — giving AI the memory to truly understand every situation. All of this comes in a platform that can be deployed across even the most complex enterprises, in just weeks, not months.

Key capabilities include - Highly Configurable Intelligence, Low Latency, High Empathy – Multi-intent understanding, emotional awareness, and multilingual fluency, Built for the Enterprise - Giga was designed to scale to the largest B2C companies in the world, with enterprise-grade security, compliance, and reliability built in from day one, Enterprise-Grade Security Powerful Platform – Out-of-the-box analytics, automated QA, and low-code tools to customize every part of the agent, Context as a Superpower – Every conversation is remembered, analyzed, and used to improve the next.

Giga’s system ingests a company’s entire support knowledge base and instantly generates high-accuracy agents. These agents handle real-time reasoning across complex policies and systems — without human handoff.

Organizations globally spend billions on call centers every year and yet the customer experience is still broken. ” said Varun Vummadi, co-founder and CEO. “We built Giga to change that. For the first time ever, machines are capable of understanding the nuances of customer voices and holding conversations with them, fundamentally changing the way the world interacts with devices.

Aniket Kamthe of Nexus Venture Partners, said, “We’re thrilled to be working with Giga at this inflection point for AI-powered customer experiences. They're setting new standards for deploying AI reliably at scale across complex enterprise environments."

Designed for high-compliance industries like ecommerce, financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications, Giga’s agents use retrieval-augmented generation and contextual reasoning to deliver policy-safe, emotionally intelligent conversations, without sacrificing speed or accuracy.

Giga’s voice systems already handle millions of customer calls every month for large-scale enterprises, dramatically reducing wait times.

At DoorDash, Giga’s deployment improved resolution speed, reduced escalations, and enhanced operational efficiency across teams.

At DoorDash, we operate at a massive scale across services, platforms, and languages,” said DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang. “Giga leveraged usage data to deliver measurable improvements, including fewer escalations, faster resolution paths, and more efficient workflows across our teams. As we continue to grow across more than 40 countries and serve nearly 50 million people each month, partnerships like this are critical to delivering better outcomes for consumers on a global scale.

To learn more, please visit https://giga.ai/.

About Giga

Giga is an AI platform that automates enterprise customer support with emotionally intelligent, real-time agents. Designed for high-compliance environments, Giga’s agents combine contextual reasoning, secure orchestration, and sub-second response times to deliver human-quality conversations at global scale and ease a variety of customer support issues, from call abandonment to customer wait times. To learn more, please visit https://giga.ai/ .

UST Invests in Israel’s aiOla to Advance Voice-Led AI Workflows for Frontline Industries

Amir Haramaty, President and Co-founder, aiOla

UST, a leading AI and technology transformation solutions company, has strengthened its presence at the intersection of human-AI interaction with its recent investment in aiOla. Israel-based aiOla is a deep tech voice and conversational AI lab that has built a voice-agentic AI platform that powers workflow agents, converting frontline speech into structured, auditable workflows. The deal follows a successful collaboration initiated and incubated by UST’s open-innovation arm, UST Spark.

With this strategic investment, UST expands its growing technology advantage in next-generation AI solutions. With expertise in frontline intensive verticals such as healthcare and life sciences, retail, manufacturing, and automotive, UST and aiOla are strongly positioned to transform the frontline worker experience in these industries through AI and natural voice-to-system execution. This partnership strengthens aiOla’s ability to bring innovation to market and scale voice-agentic automation in mission-critical settings across a variety of verticals.

So far, enterprises have primarily found success integrating AI into back-office processes. But this has resulted in the collection of more valuable frontline data has lagged because it remains stuck behind unconnected keyboards, clipboards, and fragmented apps. Natural and agentic voice processing efficiently captures this critical frontline data, resulting in superior demand forecasting and richer insights while also reducing costs associated with traditional manual data capture methods.

aiOla is a leader in this emerging field, and its platform turns shorthand data captured through spoken inputs into structured, auditable information. With aiOla, frontline workers can interact with their own systems through voice input in any environment, overcoming background noise, accents, and jargon to work faster, reduce manual errors, and seamlessly capture critical information. This replaces keystrokes with agentic, voice-led workflows that capture triple the data, three times faster. UST invested in aiOla because it is the only voice-to-workflow platform purpose-built for enterprise operations, scaling in jargon-heavy, industry-specific environments, while also adapting to each site’s terminology and enforcing consistent processes across locations.

Because UST is a key strategic partner for Fortune 500 enterprises, the company is well positioned to streamline the rollout of this innovative technology to clients, allowing them to benefit from a holistic approach to products and platforms that support complex work processes.

Manu Gopinath, President, UST

"At UST, we envision enterprise transformation enabled by AI as the next major leap for business. By integrating advanced voice and conversational AI technologies with our platforms and solutions, we empower frontline workers with seamless, intuitive experiences—automating data capture, accelerating workflows, and optimizing operational efficiency at scale. These capabilities are redefining how work gets done in the field, bringing actionable intelligence and measurable outcomes directly to those who deliver value every day. Our investment in aiOla, aligned with UST’s proven technology ecosystem, reinforces our commitment to delivering the powerful tools enterprises need to transform services, drive innovation, and set new standards for operational excellence,” said Manu Gopinath, President, UST.

“UST is the ideal partner to help bring aiOla’s voice-agentic workflows into the heart of the enterprise. Together, we’re enabling organizations in critical industries like pharmaceuticals and manufacturing to replace manual, error-prone processes with seamless, voice-driven workflows that give teams real-time access to data and processes, unlocking a more efficient and agile way of working at scale,” said Amir Haramaty, President and Co-founder, aiOla.

UST and aiOla did not disclose the investment value.

Operant AI Uncovers Stealth Exploit Targeting MCP Connected AI Assistants

1. A critical security flaw in MCP (Model Context Protocol) enables invisible data theft across all major AI and Agentic platforms
2. New attack class exploits trusted AI agents to silently exfiltrate critical PII, including SSNs, medical records, and financial data. 
3. The discovery of Shadow Escape comes amid Cybersecurity Awareness Month, underscoring the urgent need for AI-native defense mechanisms as enterprises accelerate adoption of agentic AI frameworks.

Operant AI, the world’s only Runtime AI Defense Platform, today disclosed the discovery of Shadow Escape, a powerful zero-click attack that exploits Model Context Protocol (MCP) and connected AI agents. The exploit enables data exfiltration via popular AI agents and assistants, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other LLM-powered agents.

As enterprises rapidly adopt agentic AI through MCP servers and MCP-based integrations to connect large language models (LLMs) to internal tools, APIs, and databases, Shadow Escape demonstrates a new class of threats that operate entirely inside the firewall and within authorized identity boundaries, making them invisible to conventional cybersecurity monitoring.

The Shadow Escape attack demonstrates the absolute criticality of securing MCP and agentic identities. Operant AI's ability to detect and block these types of attacks in real-time and redact critical data before it crosses unknown and unwanted boundaries is pivotal to operationalizing MCP in any environment, especially in industries that have to follow the highest security standards, said Donna Dodson, the former Chief of Cybersecurity at NIST.

According to McKinsey’s 2025 Technology Trends Outlook, nearly 80% of enterprises are now using generative or agentic AI assistants for critical business functions—many of which depend on MCP for secure access management and workflow automation. Operant AI’s research estimates that trillions of private records may be at risk of exposure through such zero-click MCP-based data exfiltration chains.

Operant AI has formally reported this security issue to OpenAI and initiated the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) designation process. Critically, this is not a vulnerability specific to any individual LLM or Agent provider; it represents a fundamentally new attack path that affects any AI agent or AI application that utilizes MCP.

The Attack Chain

Unlike traditional prompt injection or data leaks, this attack doesn’t need user error, phishing, or malicious browser extensions. Instead, it leverages the trust already granted to AI agents and AI assistants through legitimate MCP connections.

The attack unfolds in three stages:

1. Infiltration: Malicious instructions are embedded invisibly in documents uploaded to AI agents—documents that appear completely legitimate and pass standard security scans. 
2. Discovery: AI agents proactively discover and surface sensitive data across connected databases without explicit user requests, leveraging MCP's powerful cross-system access capabilities. 
3. Exfiltration: Hidden directives instruct the AI agent to transmit entire datasets to external endpoints, disguised as routine performance tracking or analytics uploads

The attack first enables the AI agent to access and display critical PII data to any human interacting with it, violating basic data governance standards, including HIPAA and PCI compliance. It then uses an invisible zero-click instruction to extract that PII, including Social Security numbers, medical record numbers, and other personally identifiable information (PII) to the dark web, all without IT or standard security measures blocking or detecting the breach. Using the Shadow Escape attack path, malicious entities are able to gain everything needed to perpetrate identity theft, Medicare fraud, financial fraud, and more, all without users or IT organizations realizing the exfiltration is happening.

Shadow Escape Is Not Limited to One AI Provider or Platform

Shadow Escape affects any organization using MCP-enabled AI agents or MCP-connected AI assistants, including ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), Custom AI agents built on various LLM backends, Open-source alternatives like Llama-based assistants, and Industry-specific AI copilots across healthcare, finance, and customer service. The common thread isn't the specific AI Agent—it's the Model Context Protocol that grants these agents unprecedented access to organizational systems.

Beyond Traditional Security

"While MCP has become a foundational protocol enabling powerful AI integrations, our research reveals that standard MCP configurations create unprecedented attack surfaces that operate beyond the reach of traditional security controls," said Vrajesh Bhavsar, CEO and co-founder of Operant AI. "Shadow Escape demonstrates how AI agents can be weaponized through 0-click attacks that are invisible to both users and conventional security methods. The attack happens entirely within authenticated sessions, using legitimate credentials, making the blast radius potentially catastrophic given the scale and speed at which agents can operate."

Shadow Escape can impact many highly sensitive, privacy-regulated, and commonly used AI/Human interactions, including medical assistants using AI to access patient records, insurance databases, or treatment protocols or banking representatives using AI copilots connected to transaction systems, credit databases, or fraud detection monitoring systems.

Operant AI's Security Research team recommends organizations take immediate action to assess and secure their MCP deployments by conducting comprehensive audits of all AI agents and AI assistants with MCP access to organizational systems, databases, and APIs; implementing runtime AI defense guardrails capable of detecting and blocking zero-click data exfiltration attempts; establishing MCP trust zones with explicit allow-listing of authorized servers and real-time blocking of untrusted connections; deploying sensitive data flow monitoring with in-line auto-redaction capabilities for PII, PHI, and financial information; and reviewing and governing MCP tools access following least-privilege principles.

For more information about Shadow Escape and Operant AI's MCP and AI security solutions, visit: www.operant.ai/art-kubed/shadow-escape

About Operant AI

Operant AI, the world’s only Runtime AI Defense Platform, delivers comprehensive, real-time protection for AI applications, AI agents, and MCP. Operant AI’s AI Gatekeeper and MCP Gateway are specifically designed for the unique challenges of the modern AI-native world.

With its advanced cloud-native discovery, detection, and defense capabilities, Operant AI is able to actively detect and block the most critical modern attacks including prompt injection, data exfiltration, and MCP tool poisoning, while keeping AI applications running in private mode with in-line auto-redaction of sensitive data and contextual IAM for AI Agents. Operant AI empowers security teams to confidently deploy AI applications and agents at scale without sacrificing safety or compliance.

Operant AI is the only representative vendor listed by Gartner for all four core AI-security categories: AI TRiSM (Trust, Risk, and Security Management), API Protection, MCP Gateways, and AI Agents. Founded in 2021 by Vrajesh Bhavsar, Dr. Priyanka Tembey, and Ashley Roof—industry experts from Apple, VMware, and Google respectively, Operant AI is a San Francisco-based Series A company funded by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Felicis and Washington DC venture capital firm SineWave.

“A Global Powerhouse in Agentic AI”: Capgemini Finalizes $3.3B WNS Acquisition

Capgemini (Euronext Paris: CAP) today announced that it has completed the acquisition of WNS (NYSE: WNS), a digital-led business transformation and services company and leader in the Digital BPS (Business Process Services) market. With the closing of this transaction, Capgemini creates a global leader in Intelligent Operations to capture clients’ investment in Agentic AI to transform their end-to-end business processes.

“Capgemini and WNS share a common vision of the potential of agentic AI to transform our clients’ business operations,” comments Aiman Ezzat, CEO of Capgemini. “By combining Capgemini’s global reach, strategy and transformation capabilities, technology and AI leadership with WNS’s industry expertise and platforms, we’re uniquely positioned to help our clients reinvent their business processes end-to-end and lead in their market. We can now move forward in building together a global leader in Intelligent Operations. I am delighted to welcome WNS’ employees to the Group.”

“Our teams are looking forward to beginning this next chapter, joining forces with Capgemini to create a global powerhouse and build something truly transformative in the era of generative and agentic AI,” said Keshav R. Murugesh, CEO of WNS. “The next wave of transformation will be driven by intelligent, domain and industry-centric operations, delivering efficiency and agility through hyper-automation for superior business outcomes. Our shared values and culture will make for a seamless integration, enabling us to unlock exciting opportunities and long-term value for our clients, employees, partners, and communities.” 

On July 7, 2025, Capgemini and WNS announced that they had entered into a definitive transaction agreement, pursuant to which Capgemini acquired WNS to create a global leader in Agentic AI-powered Intelligent Operations for a cash consideration of 76.50 USD per WNS share. The total cash consideration amounts to $3.3 billion, excluding WNS’ net financial debt[Net financial debt of WNS was negligible as at March 31, 2025.]. On September 18, 2025, Capgemini announced that it has successfully priced a total of €4.0 billion bonds to finance this transaction, refinance its financial debt, and for general corporate purposes of the Group. As a result of this bond issuance, the bridge loan signed in the context of the acquisition was cancelled. WNS will be consolidated into Capgemini’s financial statements as of October 17, 2025.

NPCI Unveils Agentic AI-Powered IoT Payments via UPI, Signaling India’s Next Leap in Intelligent Commerce

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) today showcased a live demonstration of Agentic AI-based IoT Payments powered by UPI, highlighting the next phase of seamless, intelligent digital transactions.

Image - X/Kushal Jasani

The demonstration was presented in the presence of Shri Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder & Chairman, Infosys and Hon. Advisor to NPCI on Innovations & Public Policy. The feature, which is currently in the pilot stage, showcased how users can discover and order items seamlessly from merchants through AI platforms such as Gemini, bringing greater convenience and personalization to digital commerce.

The solution is enabled by user-authorized AI chatbots, agents, and applications capable of initiating UPI payments based on contextual triggers, voice or text commands, and user-defined routines. These AI-powered systems can operate across devices, ensuring secure, efficient, and intuitive payment experiences.

Shri Nandan Nilekani

This demonstration marks a significant step toward the convergence of AI, and digital payments, underscoring NPCI’s commitment to driving innovation and shaping the future of India’s digital economy.

The demonstration was attended by Shri Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder & Chairman of Infosys and Hon. Advisor to NPCI on Innovations & Public Policy, underscoring the strategic importance of this innovation in India’s fintech roadmap.

From Discovery to Payment: AI Agents Take the Lead

The pilot illustrated how user-authorized AI chatbots and applications—such as those powered by Gemini—can autonomously discover products, place orders, and initiate payments via UPI. These agents respond to contextual triggers, voice or text commands, and user-defined routines, offering a frictionless and personalized commerce experience.

“Agentic AI is redefining digital payments by making them intuitive, secure, and context-aware,” said an NPCI spokesperson. “This is not just a technical upgrade—it’s a shift toward intelligent commerce.”

A New Era of Seamless Transactions

The solution enables payments across IoT devices, allowing users to interact with smart platforms—from wearables to home assistants—without manual intervention. By integrating AI with UPI’s robust infrastructure, NPCI aims to simplify everyday transactions while enhancing security and personalization.

This initiative complements NPCI’s broader push toward biometric authentication and risk-based models, including recent rollouts of fingerprint and facial recognition for UPI payments.

Strategic Vision for India’s Digital Economy

The demonstration reflects NPCI’s commitment to shaping the future of India’s digital economy through innovation. Speaking at the event, Nilekani emphasized the convergence of AI and payments as a critical frontier for financial inclusion and user empowerment.

As the pilot progresses, NPCI plans to expand the capabilities of Agentic AI across sectors, potentially transforming retail, mobility, and public services.