Voice AI Startup Navana.ai Raises INR 40 Cr Series A

Navana.ai, a sovereign voice AI company for regulated enterprises, has raised INR 40 crore in a Series A round led by entrepreneur and investor Ronnie Screwvala. Sharad Sanghi, Antler India, Sandeep Singhal and Paula Mariwala also participated.

The funds will be used to scale deployments among BFSI enterprises, advance speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and develop the company’s AI Contact Centre and automated evaluation platform.

Navana.ai has processed over 100 million voice AI minutes for BFSI players including Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank and Grihum Housing Finance, automating call centre functions across sales, collections, compliance and support.

Co-founded by brothers Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, the company has built proprietary speech models in 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects, trained on real-world Indian speech to handle noise, overlapping speech, code-switching and regional accents. It has collaborated on open-source projects with IISc Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation, including RESPIN, a 10,000-hour speech corpus spanning 45 dialects developed with IISc.

In an internal benchmarking exercise across Indian voice AI platforms, Navana.ai’s Bodhi recorded the highest accuracy on real-world speech samples. India’s voice AI category is estimated to be worth INR 9,500 crore.

Raoul Nanavati, Co-Founder and CEO, Navana.ai, said: “From day one, our mission has been to democratise access to digital services for every Indian, irrespective of where they live. India has spent the last decade building critical digital rails, including identity, connectivity and payments. This next decade belongs to meaningful automation, and we believe voice AI will enable that automation to benefit every Indian, irrespective of language or literacy.”