Voice AI startup Navana.ai has raised INR 40 crore in a Series A funding round led by entrepreneur and investor Ronnie Screwvala, as the company looks to expand its voice automation business across India’s regulated financial services sector.
The round also saw participation from Antler India, Sharad Sanghi, Sandeep Singhal and Paula Mariwala, among other investors. The company said the fresh capital will support the expansion of deployments among banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) enterprises, development of speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and further product development across its AI Contact Centre and automated evaluation platforms.
Navana.ai is positioning itself as a sovereign, full-stack voice AI provider for regulated enterprises. Its platform is designed to support on-premise deployments, allowing enterprises to retain greater control over customer data while meeting privacy, security and regulatory requirements.
The company 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 systems are used for sales, collections, compliance and customer support functions.
Founded by brothers Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, Navana.ai is focused on addressing the linguistic diversity of India’s digital economy. The founders argue that English-first digital services remain inaccessible to a large section of the population, creating an opportunity for voice-based interfaces that can operate in local languages and dialects.
Navana.ai has developed proprietary speech models covering 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects. The models are trained on real-world Indian speech and are designed to handle challenges including background noise, overlapping conversations, code-switching and regional accents.
The company has also participated in open-source research initiatives with institutions including the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation. In collaboration with IISc, Navana.ai open-sourced RESPIN, a 10,000-hour speech corpus covering 45 dialects that the company describes as one of the largest openly available datasets for Indic speech.
Navana.ai’s Bodhi speech models are central to its enterprise voice AI offering. According to a company-conducted benchmark using real-world speech samples across Indian voice AI platforms, Bodhi recorded the highest accuracy among the platforms tested. The benchmark was conducted by Navana.ai and has not been independently validated.
The company’s focus on data sovereignty comes as enterprises and regulators increasingly scrutinize how customer information is processed by AI systems. For financial institutions in particular, the ability to deploy AI within controlled infrastructure can be an important consideration when adopting voice automation for customer-facing operations.
Screwvala said India’s linguistic diversity presents a challenge for generalized AI models and argued that voice AI could become an important component of the country’s digital infrastructure. He estimated that India’s voice AI category could reach INR 9,500 crore in value, while emphasizing data residency and regulatory compliance as key considerations for enterprises.
“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. “What is important as India builds its voice AI models is not price of the offerings, but about where the customer data actually sits and whether the models are regulator-compliant.”
Nanavati said the company plans to use the new funding to take its sovereign AI infrastructure to a larger set of BFSI customers while continuing to develop voice models for India’s diverse linguistic environment.
The funding comes as India’s enterprise AI market moves beyond experimentation toward applications tied directly to business operations. For Navana.ai, BFSI represents a significant initial market, given the sector’s large volumes of customer interactions and the growing demand for automation across contact centers, collections and compliance.
With its latest funding, the company will focus on scaling enterprise deployments while investing in speech intelligence and AI contact-centre capabilities tailored to India’s multilingual market.
