Voice AI startup Navana.ai raises Rs. 40 crore round led by Ronnie Screwvala

Navana.ai is a full stack voice AI company in India offering regulated enterprises Voice AI driven business outcomes without compromising on data privacy and compliance through on-prem deployments

Navana.ai, a leading sovereign voice AI company for regulated enterprises, today announced that it has raised INR 40 crore in a Series A funding round led by renowned entrepreneur and investor Ronnie Screwvala. Other investors, including Sharad Sanghi, Antler India, Sandeep Singhal and Paula Mariwala have also participated in the round, as Navana.ai deepens its pan-India reach through its proprietary speech models across Indic languages.

This fresh capital raised will be used to scale the company’s deployments among BFSI enterprises, to continue spearheading innovation in speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and further the product development of the company’s AI Contact Centre and automated evaluation platform.

Navana.ai has serviced over 100 million voice ai minutes  with leading BFSI players such as Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank, Grihum Housing Finance and others to automate their call center driven business outcomes across sales, collections, compliance and support with Voice AI.

Co-founded by brothers Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, their mission is rooted in a simple observation from the founders that the vast majority of Indians (with only 6–10% speaking English and just 38% of households digitally literate) have been locked out of English-first digital services. By building voice AI that meets people in their own language and dialect, Navana.ai aims to close that gap at the scale of the country's 1 billion-plus internet users.

Navana.ai has built proprietary speech models in 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects on real-world Indian speech to handle noise, overlapping speech, code-switching and regional accents. The company has contributed to the ecosystem through long-standing open source collaborations with institutions including IISc Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation. With IISc, Navana.ai open-sourced RESPIN, a 10,000-hour speech corpus spanning 45 dialects, one of the largest openly available Indic speech datasets.

In a benchmarking conducted by Navana.ai across various Indian voice AI platforms using real world speech samples, Navana.ai’s Bodhi came out with the highest accuracy in the market making it the most capable in handling real customer conversations.

Announcing the company’s fundraise, 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.”

Investor Ronnie Screwvala, commented, “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 INR 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.”