YC-Backed Voice AI Startup Bolna Raises $6.3 Mn Seed Round Led by…

Bolna, a Bengaluru-based enterprise voice AI startup, has raised $6.3 million in seed funding in a round led by General Catalyst, as Indian enterprises increasingly look to automate high-volume, multilingual voice interactions.

The round also saw participation from Y Combinator, Blume Ventures, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, Transpose Capital, Eight Capital, and prominent angel investors including Aarthi Ramamurthy, Arpan Sheth, Sriwatsan Krishnan, Ravi Iyer, and Taro Fukuyama.

Founded in 2024, Bolna is building a self-serve voice AI platform that allows enterprises to design, deploy, and monitor human-like voice agents without long implementation cycles or deep AI expertise. The platform is purpose-built for India’s complex telephony environment, supporting more than 10 Indian languages, regional accents, and noisy real-world conditions.

The fresh capital will be used to expand engineering and deployment teams, invest in proprietary AI and machine learning systems for vernacular voice, and strengthen enterprise-grade infrastructure to support large-scale production deployments.

Maitreya Wagh, Founder & CEO, Bolna

“Voice remains the most critical channel for enterprises in India, but migrating from IVR or human-led workflows to voice AI is still slow and complex,” said Maitreya Wagh, Founder & CEO, Bolna. “Most companies wait weeks for custom agents. Our focus is enabling enterprises to build, test, deploy, and monitor voice AI on their own, at scale.”

Since its first commercial deployment in May 2025, Bolna has scaled rapidly — from handling 1,500 calls per day to over 200,000 daily calls. The company now serves 1,050+ paying customers across sectors including e-commerce, BFSI, logistics, recruitment, and education.

Bolna’s customer base includes large enterprises such as Varun Beverages, along with high-growth startups like Spinny and Snabbit. The platform is also widely used in voice-dependent sectors such as travel and matrimonial services, where multilingual voice remains the primary interface.

“Bolna makes it incredibly easy to build and deploy voice AI agents,” said Neeraj Arora, CEO India, MENA & Managing Director at General Catalyst. “We see them becoming the default platform for businesses looking to automate calls with voice AI.”

A key differentiator is Bolna’s orchestration layer, which routes each call to the best-fit AI model based on language, context, and desired outcome — rather than relying on a single foundational model.

“We don’t believe one model can meet all enterprise voice AI needs,” said Prateek Sachan, Founder & CTO, Bolna. “Our orchestration layer ensures every call is handled by the most effective model, optimising performance at scale.”

Indian enterprises handle over one billion voice calls daily across customer support, onboarding, collections, recruitment, and logistics. Despite increasing digitisation, much of this volume still depends on legacy IVR systems and human agents, making large-scale, multilingual operations expensive and difficult to manage.

“When we met the founders, some investors advised them to downplay India and position themselves as global,” said Tom Blomfield, Group Partner at Y Combinator. “I told them the opposite. India’s linguistic complexity makes it one of the hardest voice markets in the world — and Bolna was already solving it while generating revenue.”

While Bolna serves customers across 10+ countries, India remains its primary focus. The company was also the only India-focused startup in its recent Y Combinator batch.

As enterprises move beyond AI pilots into core operations, voice is emerging as a critical automation interface. Bolna aims to become the foundational infrastructure powering how Indian businesses manage billions of voice conversations in the years ahead.

About Bolna

Bolna is an enterprise Voice AI platform enabling businesses to build, test, deploy, and monitor multilingual, human-like AI agents at scale. Supporting 10+ Indian vernacular languages, Bolna processes 200,000+ daily calls across sectors including e-commerce, logistics, BFSI, recruitment, and education. The company is backed by General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and Blume Ventures, with India as its core market.