Navana.ai Raises ₹40 Cr Series A Funding Led by Ronnie Screwvala
Navana.ai has processed 100 million+ minutes of enterprise voice AI, with its Bodhi speech models supporting 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects for BFSI use cases such as sales, collections, compliance and customer support.
Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Navana.ai has raised ₹40 crore (around $4.2 million) in a Series A funding round led by entrepreneur and investor Ronnie Screwvala, as the company looks to expand its voice AI platform across India’s banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector.
The round also saw participation from Antler India, Sharad Sanghi, Sandeep Singhal, Paula Mariwala and other investors. Ronnie Screwvala is an existing investor in Navana.ai, while the latest round brings additional backing as the company moves deeper into regulated enterprise AI.
Navana.ai will use the fresh capital to expand its deployments across BFSI enterprises, strengthen speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and develop its AI Contact Centre and automated evaluation platform.
Founded by brothers Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, who began working on voice AI in 2018, Navana.ai builds what it describes as a full-stack voice AI platform for regulated enterprises. Its technology is designed to support on-premise deployments, allowing enterprises to retain greater control over customer data while addressing privacy, localisation and regulatory requirements.
The company has processed more than 100 million minutes of voice AI for enterprise customers across demanding use cases. Its BFSI clients include Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank and Grihum Housing Finance, with deployments spanning areas such as sales, collections, compliance and customer support.
Navana.ai’s proprietary Bodhi speech models cover 12 Indian languages and 45 dialects. The models are designed to handle challenges common in Indian voice interactions, including background noise, overlapping speech, code-switching and regional accents.
The company has also been working with institutions including IISc Bengaluru, IIT Madras, Microsoft Research and the Gates Foundation as part of its efforts to build speech technology for India’s multilingual environment.
Navana.ai has reported strong results for its Bodhi speech-to-text technology in its own benchmarking exercise. According to the company, Bodhi was tested against Sarvam, Microsoft Azure, Smallest and Deepgram using more than 67,000 real speech clips across nine Indian languages and six public datasets. The company said Bodhi recorded the lowest word-error rate across each of the languages tested. These are company-reported benchmark results and have not been independently verified.
The company’s latest funding follows an earlier ₹7 crore round led by Antler India in 2025, which came after Navana.ai had spent several years developing its speech technology and building language datasets and models.