Bengaluru, Feb 11 (IANS): Voice AI startup Vernacular.ai on Thursday said it strengthened its workforce by four times in financial year 2020 as it announced the appointment of two new members to its leadership team.

Gangadhar Kodandaram has been appointed the Chief Revenue Officer and Ankit Jain as Vice President for Product Management.

Both Kodandaram and Jain will work directly with Sourabh Gupta, CEO and Co-founder of Vernacular.ai, to grow the business and spearhead global expansion starting with the SouthEast Asian markets.

Prior to joining Vernacular.ai, Gangadhar was with Microsoft India building the healthcare vertical.

Jain brings to the new role over 10 years of experience in product management.

"As we continue to make headway towards becoming the world's most immersive Voice AI platform, we are glad to have new leaders like Gangadhar and Ankit back this dream, bringing to the table their multifunctional expertise in emerging technologies," Gupta said in a statement.

Besides strengthening its workforce, Vernacular.ai said it has also stayed on schedule with appraisals, bonuses and promotions to ensure their employees are taken care of, and stay motivated to succeed.

The company said that it will continue with this strategy, hiring aggressively in 2021 to expand its workforce by 2x, closing key leadership positions and senior roles.

Vernacular.ai provides an AI-based voice automation platform -- Vernacular Intelligent Virtual Assistant (VIVA), that helps accelerate engagement strategy and utilises speech recognition and natural language understanding (NLU) technology.