Navana.ai has raised Rs 40 crore in a Series A funding round led by entrepreneur and investor Ronnie Screwvala, as the company looks to expand its presence across India and accelerate the development of its voice AI technology.
The funding round also saw participation from Antler India, Sharad Sanghi, Sandeep Singhal and Paula Mariwala. Navana.ai plans to use the fresh capital to expand its deployments across the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector, strengthen its speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and further develop its AI Contact Centre and automated evaluation platform.
Founded by brothers Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, Navana.ai focuses on delivering voice AI solutions to enterprises that require data privacy, regulatory compliance and deployment flexibility. The company enables businesses to use voice AI for functions such as sales, collections, compliance and customer support.
Navana.ai said it has processed more than 100 million voice AI minutes for BFSI organisations including Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank and Grihum Housing Finance.
The company has developed proprietary speech models covering 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects. These models are trained on real-world Indian speech and are designed to handle challenges such as background noise, overlapping conversations, code-switching and regional accents.
Navana.ai’s focus on Indic languages is aimed at addressing the limitations of English-first digital services. The company believes voice-based interfaces can help make digital services more accessible to users across different languages and levels of digital literacy.
The company has also contributed to open-source speech technology initiatives with institutions including IISc Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation. In collaboration with IISc, Navana.ai open-sourced RESPIN, a 10,000-hour speech corpus covering 45 dialects.
The company’s voice AI platform, Bodhi, has also recorded strong results in benchmarking conducted by Navana.ai using real-world Indian speech samples. According to the company, Bodhi achieved the highest accuracy among the platforms assessed.
Raoul Nanavati, Co-Founder and CEO, Navana.ai, said, “From day one, Navana.ai’s mission has been to democratise access to digital services for every Indian, irrespective of where they live. India has spent the last decade building some of these critical digital rails, including identity, connectivity and payments. Now this next decade belongs to meaningful automation. We strongly believe that voice AI will enable automation to truly benefit every Indian’s life, irrespective of their language or literacy. We are excited to partner with Ronnie Screwvala to take our sovereign AI infrastructure to the next stage of scale with some of the biggest names in the BFSI industry.”
Ronnie Screwvala, Investor, said, “Navana.ai is solving a problem that large global and generalised AI models simply aren’t built for, which is the sheer linguistic complexity and diversity of India. Voice AI will be a critical part of India’s digital infrastructure as it will soon be an Rs 9,500 crore-worth category. But what is important as India builds its voice AI models is not price of the offerings, but about where the customer data actually sits and whether the models are regulator-compliant. Navana.ai addresses exactly this, proving to be a reliable voice AI partner for India’s enterprises.”
With the new funding, Navana.ai plans to scale its enterprise deployments while continuing to build voice AI infrastructure tailored to India’s diverse linguistic environment. The company is positioning its technology as a sovereign and compliance-focused solution for enterprises adopting AI-powered customer interactions and automation.
Send news announcements/press releases to:
editor@thefoundermedia.com
About The Author
