AI startup Cekura, an IIT Bombay alumni-founded company backed by Y Combinator, is planning to open an office in India following a $2.4 million fundraise. The company provides a testing and observability layer for voice and chat AI, enabling teams to simulate conversations at scale, monitor production calls, and generate actionable insights.
Cekura's Co-Founder Sidhant Kabra noted that their technology has reduced the testing process from weeks to minutes, which has helped them onboard over 75 customers within a year of being incubated at Y-Combinator. The new funding will be used to hire more engineers and scale to more enterprise customers. A portion of the funds will also be used to open their India office in Bangalore, in addition to their existing headquarters in the US. Cekura already has a team and customers in India, including Prodigal, Nurix, and Skit.
Founded in 2024 by IIT Bombay alumni Sidhant Kabra, Shashij Gupta, and Tarush Agarwal, Cekura aims to make every AI conversation reliable. Cekura's technology simulates thousands of synthetic calls or chats in minutes, pushing agents through tricky edge cases, and monitoring production conversations to catch failures before end-users notice them. The startup safeguards voice and chat interactions for large enterprises and hyper-growth startups in healthcare, BFSI, and retail.
Cekura uses AI to simulate conversations and generate thousands of edge-case scenarios to test AI agents before they go live. According to Kabra, customers will interrupt, be toxic, try to jailbreak the system, and operate out of bias, so it's important to stress test the agents before deployment.
The company monetizes via a subscription model for startup clients, starting at $1,000 per month, and also has custom enterprise offerings. While 90% of its business is focused on voice agents, it also builds chat agents. The funding will be used to enhance Cekura's scenario-generation engine and deepen coverage metrics. The company also aims to expand to more enterprise teams, helping them get closer to their vision of making every conversational AI agent reliable and secure.
The investors who participated in the $2.4 million seed funding round include Y Combinator, Flex Capital, Hike Ventures, Kulveer Taggar, Pioneer Fund, Chris Smoak, Ooshma Garg, Richard Aberman, JJ Fliegelman, Decacorn, Alan Rutledge, Imagination Capital, Allport Capital, Ignite Ventures, Klaus Sayn-Wittgenstein, Matt Lenhard, Jinal Jhaveri, Patrick D. Deem, Jr., Austen Allred, Avinash Gupta Konda, Amitav Chakravartty, Allen Wu, Raphael Schaad, and Rishi Penmetcha.
Cekura's vision is to make building a reliable Conversational AI agent as straightforward as spinning up a website. They believe enterprises should be able to trust their AI voice and chat agents the same way they trust their best human employees. Cekura helps teams define what "correct" means for them and automatically validate it, enforcing unique standards for each company's policy and tone. Cekura's long-term goal is to elevate the quality bar for all AI-driven conversations, creating a world where interacting with an AI agent feels helpful and secure.
The company's pitch deck highlighted a clear problem statement, an innovative AI-driven approach, a strong market opportunity, impressive early traction, and an experienced founding team. The $2.4 million infusion will be used to expand Cekura's engineering team, enhance its AI algorithms, and deepen enterprise partnerships.
India's artificial intelligence market is experiencing explosive growth, with the market size projected to reach $244.22 billion in 2025. The market is expected to grow at an annual rate of 26.60% from 2025-2031, resulting in a market volume of $1.01 trillion by 2031.
