Industry reports and the growth of voice modeling companies in the Indian market suggest that there is a growing demand for voice AI solutions in the country. Voice is a popular medium for communication between people and businesses in India. Therefore, enterprises and startups are keen to use voice AI to increase efficiency in customer support, sales, customer acquisition, recruitment, and training.
But recognizing market demand is one thing, proving that a company will pay is another. Y Combinator rejected an application from Bolna, the audio orchestration startup founded by Mitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times, skeptical that the founders would be able to turn profits into revenue before finally accepting it for the fall 2025 batch.
“When we were applying to Y Combinator, the feedback we got was, ‘It’s great that we have a product that allows you to create realistic voice agents, but Indian companies won’t pay for it and we’re not going to make money from this,'” Wagh told TechCrunch.
The startup applied the same idea to the fall batch and was able to show that it could generate more than $25,000 in monthly revenue for the past few months. At the time, the company was running a $100 pilot to help users build voice agents. Currently, the startup is pricing these pilots at $500.
The momentum continues. The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $6.3 million in a seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from Y Combinator, Blume Ventures, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, Transpose Capital, and Eight Capital. The round also includes private investors such as Aarthi Ramamurthy, Arpan Sheth, Sriwatsan Krishnan, Ravi Iyer, and Taro Kawasaki.
products and customers
Borna is building an orchestration layer, which is essentially a platform to connect and manage various AI voice technologies, similar to startups like Vapi, LiveKit, and VoiceRun, to suit the idiosyncrasies of Indian interactions, such as noise cancellation, getting authenticated with caller ID platform Truecaller, and handling mixed languages.
In terms of features, the company has built in specific nuances for Indian users, such as speaking numbers in English regardless of the primary language and allowing keypad input for extended typing.
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Wagh pointed out that Bolna’s key differentiator is that users can easily build voice agents and use them to make calls without needing to know much about the underlying technology, just by explaining it. The company said 75% of its revenue comes from self-service customers.
He also said that because Bolna is an orchestration layer, it doesn’t rely on a single model, so companies can easily switch to a better model if it becomes available.
“Our platform allows customers to easily switch between models and use different models for different locales for maximum effect. An orchestration layer is needed to ensure that businesses get the best model, because one model may be better today and another model may be better tomorrow,” said Wagh.
The company has a wide range of customers, including car resale platform Spinny, on-demand housing assistance startup Snabbit, a beverage company, and a dating app. Most of these are small and medium-sized businesses using Bolna’s self-service platform.
Separately, Borna is pursuing large-scale corporate deals. For these large enterprises and custom implementations, Borna has a team of forward-deployed engineers. That is, specialists who work directly with clients on-site or closely with their teams. The startup has signed up two large companies as paying customers, and four more are in the testing phase. Borna currently employs nine forward-deployed engineers and is adding two to three people to its team each month to help drive the company forward.
Borna has experienced steady growth in both call volume and revenue. The company says it currently handles more than 200,000 calls per day and is on track to generate annual recurring revenue (ARR) of more than $700,000. The company noted that 60% to 70% of its call volume is in English or Hindi, while other regional languages are also steadily increasing.
Akarsh Shrivastava, a member of General Catalyst’s investment team, said the company found Borna great because its orchestration layer allows flexibility to serve different types of customers.
“With Bolna, you have the freedom to choose any model you want and have a stack behind you to shape the model according to your requirements. It’s a good option for people who want to own part of the stack, who want flexibility in model selection, and who want to be able to maintain those products themselves,” Shrivastava told TechCrunch over the phone.
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