Voice AI startup Navana.ai has raised Rs 40 crore ($4.2 million) in a Series A funding round led by entrepreneur and investor Ronnie Screwvala.
The round also saw participation from Antler India, Sharad Sanghi, Sandeep Singhal, Paula Mariwala and other investors.
Navana.ai plans to use the fresh capital to expand its Voice AI deployments across the BFSI sector, strengthen its speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and build out its AI Contact Centre and automated evaluation platform.
Founded by brothers Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, Navana.ai develops voice AI solutions for regulated enterprises. The startup focuses on data privacy and regulatory compliance, including through on-premise deployments for enterprises that require greater control over their data.
The company says it has processed more than 100 million voice AI minutes for BFSI players, including Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank and Grihum Housing Finance.
A key part of Navana.ai’s offering is its proprietary speech technology built for India’s linguistic diversity. Its models currently cover 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects, and are designed to work across challenges such as background noise, overlapping conversations, code-switching and regional accents.
Navana.ai has also collaborated with institutions and organisations including IISc Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation to advance its speech technology.
The startup said its Bodhi speech model recorded the highest accuracy in a benchmarking exercise involving Indian Voice AI platforms and real-world speech samples.
Screwvala said Navana.ai is addressing one of the key challenges in building AI products for India — its linguistic diversity. He also pointed to data localisation and regulatory compliance as important factors that could shape enterprise adoption of Voice AI.
For Navana.ai, the latest funding comes as enterprises increasingly look beyond conventional customer support systems towards AI-powered voice interactions that can work across India’s many languages and accents.
The startup is now focused on building Voice AI infrastructure for regulated industries, with its Bodhi speech models already being used by BFSI companies to communicate with customers in their preferred languages at scale.
