Artha Venture Fund II leads the Rs 8 crore seed fundraising for Cheerio AI

Cheerio AI, an AI-powered customer engagement platform based in Bengaluru, has raised ₹8 crore in a seed funding round led by Artha Venture Fund (AVF II). The round also saw participation from Hyderabad Angels, TiE Angels, LetsVenture and Invention Engine.

Several angel investors also joined the round, including Arjun Vaidya, Anand Shahni, Vivek Mathur, Ajeet Khurana and Nitin Verma.

The startup plans to use the funding to develop multi-modal artificial intelligence capabilities, including building a proprietary small-model large language model (LLM) for advertising content generation. The company also aims to expand its platform beyond messaging to include voice and video communication, increase AI-driven automation features and strengthen enterprise-grade capabilities.

Over the next six months, Cheerio AI plans to expand its team across engineering, AI development, enterprise sales and customer success to support scaling and global expansion.

The platform combines marketing, sales, customer support and communication workflows into a single system. It allows businesses to interact with customers across multiple channels, including WhatsApp, email, SMS, social media direct messages and in-app messaging, helping companies manage customer engagement more efficiently.