Bengaluru's Bolna Raises $6.3M to Scale Voice AI for Vernacular Calls Across India

Bengaluru Voice AI Startup Bolna Grabs $6.3 Mn to Enhance Vernacular Calls | AIM

Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Bolna has secured $6.3 million in a seed funding round led by General Catalyst. This funding round also featured participation from Y Combinator, Blume Ventures, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, Transpose Capital, and Eight Capital, as well as angel investors Aarthi Ramamurthy, Arpan Sheth, Sriwatsan Krishnan, Ravi Iyer, and Taro Fukuyama, among others. The startup will use the fresh capital to enhance its engineering and deployment teams, invest in its own AI and machine learning technologies to facilitate vernacular voice interactions, and bolster enterprise-level infrastructure to support large-scale production deployments. Since its initial commercial launch in May 2025, Bolna has grown from managing approximately 1,500 calls per day to over 200,000, it said in a statement. The company now boasts more than 1,050 paying customers across industries such as e-commerce, BFSI, logistics, recruitment, and education. Bolna serves a diverse range of clients, including large companies like Varun Beverages and startups such as Spinny and Snabbit. The startup enables high-volume voice processing as well as specialised, voice-dependent sectors such as travel and matrimonial services, where multilingual voice interactions are the primary mode of communication. In September, Bolna was accepted into the Fall 2025 cohort of Y Combinator. "The biggest thing to happen to Bolna as soon as we entered YC was gaining confidence in building for India. We spoke to alumni and successful founders who followed their gut and took well-calculated risks, without worrying about what investors or industry experts might say," Maitreya Wagh, founder and CEO at Bolna, told AIM. Bolna's orchestration layer enables businesses to run voice AI systems in multiple languages and scenarios on a single platform. Designed for high-volume telephony, it helps maintain consistent performance as call volumes grow. "Earlier, we thought a self-serve tool would be used only by indie developers and growth-stage startups. We changed our focus to building a product that can be used even by veterans, CXOs and PMs at large Indian enterprises who may not have prior experience with AI or prompting," Wagh added. The company has focused on hiring forward-deployed engineers to train key decision-makers in developing and managing voice AI agents. This initiative has led to launches with two publicly listed companies and pilot programmes with five others. Its monthly revenue increased from $20,000 in September to $56,000 by December 2025, the statement said. The enterprise pipeline is projected to reach $3 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in the coming months, and with more enterprises on board, the company aims to achieve its 2026 ARR target of $5 million by June.

Voice AI startup Bolna raises $6.3 million from General Catalyst, others

Voice AI startup Bolna has raised $6.3 million in a funding round led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm General Catalyst. The round also saw participation from Y Combinator, Blume Ventures, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, Transpose Capital, and Eight Capital, along with angel investors. The company plans to deploy the capital to scale its engineering and deployment teams, invest in proprietary AI and machine learning capabilities for vernacular voice interactions, and strengthen its enterprise-grade infrastructure to handle large-scale use cases. "Indian businesses make over a billion calls every day, or close to 30 billion a month. According to some recent industry reports, voice AI is currently used for only around 20 million calls a month, of which Bolna handles about two million. Which means that there's significant headroom for expansion," founder and chief executive Maitreya Wagh told ET. Founded in 2024, the Bengaluru-based startup provides a self-serve platform that enables enterprises to design, deploy, and monitor voice AI agents without lengthy implementation timelines or the need for specialised AI skills. "Around 75% of our users use the self-serve tool because they want complete control over the agent. The remaining 25%, our largest clients, including some listed companies we work with, opt for a fully forward-deployed service, where we build and deploy the agent for them," he said. Since its first commercial rollout in May 2025, Bolna has gone from managing about 1,500 calls a day to more than 200,000. The startup has over 1,050 paying customers spanning sectors such as ecommerce, BFSI, logistics, recruitment, and education, with its clientele ranging from enterprises like Varun Beverages to startups such as Spinny and Snabbit. "If you look at the time spent on the phone, currently human callers cost around Rs 4-5 per minute. Once you factor in onboarding, attrition, middle management, recruitment, training, vacations, and other overheads, the cost rises to about Rs 6-7 a minute. At scale, our end-to-end offering including telephony, analytics, and everything else comes to as little as Rs 2.5 per minute," Wagh said. The platform supports over 10 Indian languages -- English, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, and Bengali, and caters to customers across more than 10 countries, with India as its primary market. According to Wagh, the company's revenue stood at about $1,500 in May 2025 and rose to $56,000 by December. "We're close to an ARR of around $700,000 right now." Commenting on the investment, Neeraj Arora, CEO India, MENA, and managing director, General Catalyst said, "Bolna makes it easy to build and deploy voice AI agents, and we foresee them becoming the go-to platform for businesses automating their calls with voice AI." "India has 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects. Building voice AI that actually works here is a hard problem, and they were solving it while generating revenues," said Tom Blomfield, group partner, Y-Combinator.