Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Bolna has secured $6.3 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst, aiming to revolutionize voice automation for enterprises in India. The funding round also saw participation from Y Combinator, Blume Ventures, Eight Capital, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, Transpose Capital, and several angel investors.
Founded in 2024 by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, Bolna is building an open-source platform for creating voice AI agents capable of communicating in over 10 Indian languages, including Hinglish and Tamil. The platform allows businesses to automate calls, trigger real-time APIs, seamlessly hand off conversations to human agents when needed, and connect with tools like Zapier. Bolna's technology powers natural conversations that feel authentic and engaging.
Bolna's Voice AI Orchestration platform is specifically designed for Indian enterprises, providing them with tools to automate calls using multilingual, realistic AI agents. The platform simplifies the complexities of voice automation, managing call routing, latency, accent recognition, and real-time context memory. It utilizes speech-to-text, natural language processing, and text-to-speech within a single, integrated platform. Bolna intelligently selects and optimizes the best AI models for each call, using both its own proprietary AI model and external platforms like OpenAI and Sarvam AI to ensure fast, accurate, and lifelike responses.
Since launching commercially in May 2025, Bolna has experienced rapid growth, with daily calls increasing from 1,500 to over 200,000 – a 13,000% increase. The company powers over 500,000 minutes of calls every month across various sectors, including BFSI, e-commerce, and recruitment. With over 1,000 paying customers, the new funds will be used to expand the engineering team and further enhance the technology for India's diverse languages.
Bolna addresses the challenges of linguistic complexity, contextual requirements, and cost efficiency at scale that are unique to the Indian market. The platform delivers enterprise-grade performance with sub-500ms latency, advanced interruption handling, and smooth adaptation across more than 10 languages and 50+ accents. It can follow natural mixed-language conversations and intelligently blends multiple AI models, choosing the optimal one based on language, region, and use case.
Bolna's per-minute pricing model, starting at Rs 7 per minute and decreasing to Rs 3 for higher volumes, makes high-quality, affordable voice automation accessible to businesses of all sizes. The system automatically optimizes costs every six months by analyzing usage data and improving efficiency through smarter routing and token usage.
Bolna's success demonstrates the increasing demand for voice-based AI solutions in India, where voice communication remains a preferred channel for both consumers and businesses. Bolna aims to be the default infrastructure layer for voice communication across Indian enterprises by removing the friction of language, accent, and cost. The company plans to expand further into vertical-specific solutions, support more regional languages and dialects, and scale its orchestration capabilities to handle tens of millions of calls daily.
