Voice AI startup Navana.ai has raised ₹40 crore in a Series A funding round led by entrepreneur and investor Ronnie Screwvala. Antler India, Sharad Sanghi, CEO of Neysa, Sandeep Singhal and Paula Mariwala also participated in the round.
The company said it will use the funding to scale its deployments among banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) enterprises, expand its speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and develop its AI Contact Centre and automated evaluation platform.
Navana.ai said it has processed more than 100 million voice AI minutes for BFSI companies including Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank and Grihum Housing Finance. Its voice AI is used for sales, collections, compliance and customer support.
Founded by brothers Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, Navana.ai develops voice AI systems for regulated enterprises, with on-premise deployment options to address data privacy and compliance requirements.
“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 critical digital rails, including identity, connectivity and payments. Now this next decade belongs to meaningful automation,” said Raoul Nanavati, Co-Founder and CEO of Navana.ai.
“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,” he added.
Navana.ai has developed proprietary speech models covering 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects. The models are trained on Indian speech and are designed to handle noise, overlapping speech, code-switching and regional accents.
The company has also worked with institutions including IISc Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation. In collaboration with IISc, it open-sourced RESPIN, a 10,000-hour speech corpus covering 45 Indian dialects.
According to a benchmark conducted by Navana.ai using real-world speech samples across Indian voice AI platforms, its Bodhi speech model recorded the highest accuracy among the platforms tested.
Screwvala said the company’s focus on India’s linguistic diversity and enterprise data requirements was a key factor behind the investment.
“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,” Screwvala said.
“Voice AI will be a critical part of India’s digital infrastructure as it will soon be an ₹9,500 crore-worth category. But what is important as India builds its voice AI models is not the price of the offerings, but where the customer data actually sits and whether the models are regulator-compliant,” he added.
According to Screwvala, Navana.ai's focus on enterprise deployments and regulatory compliance positions it to serve companies that require greater control over customer data.
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