Sep 16, 2019

Dubai -based start-up Wrappup, which was acquired by Voicea last year has now been taken over by tech giants Cisco . The AI -powered voice-to-text note-taking company was incubated at the IN5 innovation center which has incubated over 160 companies in Dubai. Wrappup (Voicea) represented the UAE at the annual Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA) 2018. GSEA encourages students to own and operate a business while attending college. Wrappup which was run by Ayush Chordia, Rami Salman and Rishav Jalan opted to go for the stocks of California-based Voicea instead of taking cash. Commenting on the CISCO’s acquisition, Rishav Jain said, “It’s been a great journey for us, starting from a prototype built in a 24-hour Hackathon to now with Cisco getting the opportunity to impact millions of users with the product we built. In this journey, we were fortunate to get a lot of support from the local community and IN5 in particular which has been Wrappup’s home from start and helped us scale our start-up and connect with mentors and other entrepreneurs”. Voicea’s flagship offering is an enterprise Voice assistant that transcribes and highlight meetings. Cisco acquisition was aimed at empowering its ‘ Webex ’ platform. Top officials connected to IN5 also expressed their pleasure in the new acquisition. “In the tech industry, building the right connections and capabilities is paramount. Cisco’s acquisition of Voicea – which had acquired IN5’s Wrappup last year – is proof of that,” Ammar Al Malik, Managing Director of Dubai Internet City (DIC) and Dubai Outsource City (DOC) said. “As Dubai Internet City is home to tech companies of all sizes, the deal illustrates the power of universally scalable ideas that are supported by strong networks. We hope this encourages further world-class innovation within our local start-up scene, and we congratulate all teams involved in their success,” he added. The UAE that flaunts several governmental and semi-governmental start-up hubs account for the lion’s share of startup deals (32%) and investment (59%).