Voice AI startup Navana.ai has raised Rs 40 crore ($4.2 million) in a Series A 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. The company plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand its Voice AI deployments among BFSI enterprises, strengthen its speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and develop its AI Contact Centre and automated evaluation platform. Founded by brothers Raoul and Jai Nanavati, Navana.ai provides voice AI solutions to regulated enterprises, with a focus on data privacy and compliance through on-premise deployments. The startup claims to have processed more than 100 million voice AI minutes for BFSI companies including Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank and Grihum Housing Finance. Navana.ai has developed proprietary speech models covering 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects. Its models are designed to handle challenges such as background noise, overlapping speech, code switching and regional accents. The company has also collaborated with IISc Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation. The startup said its Bodhi speech model achieved the highest accuracy in a benchmarking exercise conducted across Indian voice AI platforms using real world speech samples. Ronnie Screwvala said that Navana.ai is addressing the linguistic complexity of India and that voice AI could become a critical part of the country’s digital infrastructure. He also highlighted data localisation and regulatory compliance as key considerations for enterprise adoption. Navana.ai is building voice AI infrastructure for regulated industries, with its Bodhi speech models being used by BFSI companies to serve customers in their own languages at scale. Bareback Media has recently raised funding from a group of investors. Some of the investors may directly or indirectly be involved in a competing business or might be associated with other companies we might write about. This shall, however, not influence our reporting or coverage in any manner whatsoever. You may find a list of our investorshere.
