upGrad co-founder Ronnie Screwvala, others invest Rs 40 crore in voice AI startup Navana.ai

Voice AI startup Navana.ai has raised Rs 40 crore in a Series A funding round led by upGrad co-founder Ronnie Screwvala. Antler India, Sharad Sanghi, Sandeep Singhal and Paula Mariwala also participated in the round. Navana.ai plans to use the funding to expand deployments among banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) companies, develop speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and further develop its AI Contact Centre and automated evaluation platform. Co-founded by brothers Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, the startup develops voice AI technology for enterprises, with a focus on sectors where data privacy and regulatory compliance are important considerations. Navana.ai offers on-premise deployments, allowing enterprises to keep greater control over their data rather than relying solely on cloud-based systems. Its proprietary speech models cover 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects and are designed to handle real-world conditions including background noise, overlapping speech, code-switching and regional accents. The startup claims to have processed more than 100 million minutes of voice AI interactions for BFSI companies, including Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank and Grihum Housing Finance. Navana.ai has also collaborated with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation on Indic speech technology. It worked with IISc Bengaluru to open-source RESPIN, a speech corpus containing about 10,000 hours of recordings across more than 38 dialects. Navana.ai's Bodhi speech model was also tested in a benchmarking exercise conducted by the company using real-world speech samples across a number of Indian voice AI platforms. Navana.ai said Bodhi recorded the highest accuracy in that assessment. Raoul Nanavati, co-founder and CEO, said the startup was seeking to make digital services accessible to people regardless of their language or literacy. Ronnie Screwvala said India's linguistic diversity created challenges that general-purpose global AI models were not necessarily designed to address. “Voice AI will be a critical part of India's digital infrastructure,” he said. Screwvala added that where customer data is stored and whether AI models comply with regulatory requirements will be important considerations for enterprises adopting the technology.