Navana.ai, an Indian-language voice AI startup, has raised ₹7 crore ($800,000) in a pre-Series A funding round led by Antler India with participation from Ajay Agarwal, Ronnie Screwvala, and Sandeep Singhal.
The fresh funds raised will be used for R&D for India-based technologies and to scale up the product in the market.
This round brings Navana’s total funds raised to ₹13.2 crore ($1.5 million). Earlier, the company had raised ₹6.2 crore in an angel round led by Sandeep Singhal from Nexus Ventures along with Standford Angel Fund, Rajan Mehra, and Saahil Goel.
Founded in 2018 by Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, Navana.ai is building India’s foundational voice AI infrastructure through proprietary speech models that understand India, not just linguistically, but contextually. Its full-stack platform helps enterprises deploy voicebots, transcription systems, and real-time analytics at scale.
The models are trained on real-world Indian voice data, covering accents, dialects, and noisy environments that global models routinely lag on. As of mid-2025, Navana supports production-grade deployments in 12+ Indian languages and is powering voice experiences for 40+ clients.
Navana’s core product suite includes:
- Bodhi Voicebot Platform: A low-code system to build, deploy, and monitor intelligent voice agents across inbound, outbound, and app-based interfaces.
- Bodhi Speech Recognition APIs: India’s most accurate ASR stack built for regional speech variations, low-connectivity zones, and IVR environments.
- Contact Center Intelligence API: Converts vast archives of customer calls into structured insights, enabling real-time quality monitoring, fraud detection, and workflow automation.
Navana’s models run seamlessly across AWS, Azure, and GCP, with VPC and full on-premise deployment options that meet the stringent data privacy and compliance needs of banking, telecom, and government clients.
Bajaj Finserv has used Navana’s voice tech to power their multilingual voicebot, which now disburses over ₹150 crore in personal loans monthly, assisted through automated conversations across six Indian languages.
Meanwhile, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank launched “Hello Ujjivan,” one of India’s first multilingual voice-led banking apps, in partnership with Navana.
Raoul Nanavati, Co-founder & CEO, Navana.ai, said, “From Day 1, Navana’s mission has been clear: to democratize access to digital services for every Indian, whether in a Mumbai high-rise or a remote village in Bihar. Our proprietary Speech AI is fully designed, built, and deployed in India to understand the linguistic and cultural richness of Indian speech across geographies. As we automate India’s $6B contact center industry, Navana is laying the infrastructure for the next generation of banking, commerce, and citizen engagement—spoken in every Indian voice.”
Gowri Shankar, Associate Partner at Antler in India, said, “India is a voice-first market, and enterprises here can’t rely on global, generic models to serve their customers. Navana’s proprietary data and Indic-language voice AI stack uniquely position them to power this shift. We’ve already seen how players like Bajaj Finserv are leveraging their technology to drive meaningful business outcomes. India’s domestic Enterprise AI adoption will be a USD 50 billion opportunity by 2035, and we believe Navana will be at the forefront, enabling large-scale adoption of voice AI across sectors.”
