Bengaluru-based startup Navana.ai secures Rs 40 crore in Series A funding led by Ronnie Screwvala to expand its speech recognition tools across India’s diverse languages, targeting banking, insurance, and financial sectors with on-premise solutions.
Navana.ai has raised Rs 40 crore in a Series A round led by investor Ronnie Screwvala, adding fresh capital to a sector where banks and other regulated businesses are looking for voice tools that can work across India’s many languages and keep customer data within their own systems. According to reports from Entrepreneur India and TigI Global, the Bengaluru-based startup will use the money to expand its deployments in banking, financial services and insurance, while sharpening its speech technology for Indian-language use cases.
The company’s core product is Bodhi, a speech model built for multilingual Indian conversations. Navana.ai says its system supports 12 languages and 45 dialects, and is designed to cope with noisy environments, overlapping speech and code-switching, where speakers move between languages in the same sentence. That focus reflects a bigger market need: voice automation in India often has to work in conditions that are far more varied than those assumed by global, English-first systems.
A key part of Navana.ai’s pitch is its preference for on-premise deployment, meaning the software sits on a client’s own servers rather than in a public cloud. For banks and insurers, that can help with privacy, data localisation and compliance requirements. The company says it has already processed more than 100 million minutes of voice interactions for customers including Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank and Jana Small Finance Bank, with use cases spanning sales, collections, compliance and customer support.
TigI Global reported that the round also included participation from Antler India, Sharad Sanghi, Sandeep Singhal and Paula Mariwala. The same report said Navana.ai plans to extend its AI contact centre tools and automated evaluation platform, alongside wider language coverage. The startup has also worked with institutions including IISc Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation, underscoring the research-heavy nature of its push into India’s multilingual voice market.
Disclaimer: This article is intended to inform and educate, not to recommend or endorse any financial product, investment or strategy. Please consider your own financial circumstances and seek professional advice where appropriate before making financial decisions.
