Voice AI startups hear the sound of money as enterprises sign up – The Economic Times

There is money pouring into Voice AI startups right now with at least three Indian companies having raised funding in January, and several more are in talks to raise funds in the coming months, according to investors and founders.

In January Bolna AI, a Y-Combinator startup, raised $6.3 million, Ringg AI raised 5.5 million and ArrowHead raised $3 million, with Voice AI startups such as Navana AI, Vaani AI and JobsUPI are looking to raise funds, founders told ET.

This comes at the back of technology improving and becoming more human-like, rising enterprises adoption. India is also seeing companies that are building voice models from ground up such as Maya Research, Soket Labs, and Pixa AI focused on the Indian languages.

This is in line with the global trends, where companies such as Deepgram, and Synthesia are mopping up hundreds of millions. In addition, big tech such as Google are betting voice models.

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder, Infosys, said at the EkStep’s Voice AI showcase in Bengaluru, that it is the final frontier of access for billions of people in the sector. He told ET at the sidelines of an event in Bengaluru, that India can have a significant role by making the design frugal so that it is inexpensive to operate, and dealing with multitude of languages and dialects. “The AI has to be good enough to deal with that. Then finally it’s about use cases such as railways. It is really applications that will get funded,” he said.

Vishal Dhupar, MD, South Asia, Nvidia, who was speaking at the same event said that voice is an interesting way of looking at a killer app, which for a market like India is enormous. But the biggest question according to him is making it seamless, building trust and reducing the cost so that it can be adopted at scale.