Exotel acqui-hires Dubverse core team to strengthen voice AI capabilities across enterprises

Exotel acqui-hires Dubverse core team in voice AI push

Cloud telephony firm Exotel has acqui-hired the core team of voice AI startup Dubverse, including cofounders Anuja Dhawan and Varshul Gupta, as it looks to deepen its capabilities in conversational intelligence and enterprise customer experience solutions. As part of the move, Dhawan will lead Exotel's Conversation Quality Analytics (CQA) solution, while Gupta will head AI, Exotel's founder Shivakumar Ganesan told ET. Dubverse, an AI-powered video dubbing platform, is primarily backed by Kalaari Capital, which led their $800,000 funding round in June 2022. Dubverse will continue to operate as a standalone platform. Exotel, backed by A91 Partners, Blume Ventures, and CX Partners, serves over 7,000 enterprises including Apollo 24/7, Shiprocket, HDFC Securities, Truecaller, and MG Motor. It handles more than 20 billion interactions annually across sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and ecommerce. This acqui-hire comes as the company pivots to being an AI-first customer engagement platform, with increased investment in voice AI, automation, and conversation intelligence. In total, the company has made five-six key senior hires from Dubeverse. "Customers started asking us to derive insights from call recordings, train models on their own data, and improve performance for their use cases. We needed a team that had experience with GPUs, training, and fine-tuning models. That's the context in which we brought in the Dubverse team," Ganesan said. Founded in 2021, Dubverse built multilingual voice AI systems, including text-to-speech and speech synthesis technologies, and has served over 3 million users across more than 70 languages, the company said. With Exotel mostly operating in the business-to-customer (B2C) space, Ganesan said that around 60% of customer experience work can be replaced by AI. He added that while the total number of human agents is expected to reduce by about 60%, the remaining will move from on-premise to the cloud. "Exotel is one of the few Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) players offering the full stack -- software, network, and infrastructure. So we are actually seeing growth in contact centre seats as well, even as automation increases," Ganesan explained. The company reported operating revenues of Rs 490.5 crore in FY25 compared to Rs 444 crore in the year prior. Around 80% of Exotel's business comes from India. However, growth rates are higher in international markets, particularly the Middle East and Africa. "The situation in the Middle East is expected to impact about 10% of our growth plans. One large deal has already been delayed, with customers preferring to hold off on new decisions for now," Ganesan said. The company is also exploring newer markets such as Japan, Latin America, and Australia. In previous years, Exotel has made acquisitions such as Ameyo (2021), Cogno AI (2021), and Croak.it (2015).

Startup News Today: Exotel Acqui-Hires Dubverse Team to Strengthen Voice AI Strategy

Startup Funding Slows: Tech Deals Hit $187 Million This Week, Down 28% YoY The demand for AI-led engagement tools continues to rise. Exotel claims to serve over 7,000 enterprises and handles more than 20 billion interactions annually across financial services, healthcare, commerce, and public services. Its technology supports communication across voice, messaging, and digital channels. Varshul Gupta, Head of AI at Exotel, said, "Over the last few years at Dubverse, I've had the chance to go very deep into the speech stack, from text-to-speech and to building multilingual voice systems for real-world Indian use cases, and that journey has taught us that building AI for India is fundamentally different. You have to account for linguistic diversity, code-switching, accent variation, cultural context, and the fact that these systems need to work reliably at scale, centered around the cost-sensitive market like India." "For me, joining Exotel felt like a very natural next step because it gives us the platform, reach, and enterprise depth to take that work forward in a much bigger way. I'm excited about the opportunity to bring our experience in speech and language AI into customer engagement and help build voice AI that feels natural, works in the real world, and creates meaningful impact for businesses across India and other multilingual, voice-first markets," he added. Exotel reported a 10 percent increase in operating revenue to Rs. 490.5 crore in FY25 from Rs. 444.5 crore in FY24. The company also turned profitable, posting a net profit of Rs. 20 crore in FY25, compared to a loss of Rs. 37 crore in the previous fiscal. According to Entrackr, Exotel has raised around $100 million to date from investors including Blume Ventures, A91 Partners, and Sistema Asia.