Navana.ai has raised ₹40 crore in a Series A round led by entrepreneur and investor Ronnie Screwvala, giving the voice AI startup fresh capital to expand its work with banks, financial services companies and insurers.
The Bengaluru-based company says its technology has already handled more than 100 million voice AI minutes for BFSI customers.
The latest funding comes as Navana focuses on a distinctly Indian challenge: building voice systems that can work across multiple languages and dialects while meeting the requirements of regulated enterprises.
Navana Builds For BFSI
The September 7, 2026 funding round also saw participation from Antler India, Sharad Sanghi, Sandeep Singhal and Paula Mariwala, among others.
Navana plans to use the money to expand its deployments across the banking, financial services and insurance sector, strengthen its speech models for Indian languages and dialects, and develop its AI contact-centre and automated evaluation products.
Founded by brothers Raoul Nanavati and Jai Nanavati, Navana develops voice AI products for enterprises. Its current offering includes an AI contact-centre platform, a speech API and an audio-intelligence API.
The company positions its technology for enterprise deployments where customers need control over how voice data is handled, including on-premise deployments.
The focus on BFSI is already reflected in its customer base. Navana says it has processed more than 100 million voice AI minutes for companies including Bajaj Finserv, Protean, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank and Grihum Housing Finance. The company’s technology is used across areas such as customer service, sales, collections and compliance.
India Needs More Than English
Navana’s pitch is built around India’s linguistic diversity. Its current website says its proprietary speech models cover 12 Indian languages and more than 40 dialects. The company says the models are trained for real-world conditions including background noise, overlapping speech, code-switching and regional accents.
That focus is also visible in research involving Navana and the Indian Institute of Science.
RESPIN-S1.0, developed by researchers from IISc and Navana Tech, contains more than 10,000 hours of validated speech across nine Indian languages and more than 38 dialects.
The corpus covers two domains, agriculture and finance, and was presented at NeurIPS 2025. The IISc dataset describes it as a dialect-rich speech resource intended to support research in multilingual and low-resource Indian language speech recognition.
This is separate from Navana’s current commercial speech-model coverage, which the company says extends to 12 languages and 40-plus dialects.
Funding Follows Earlier Round
The ₹40 crore Series A follows a ₹7 crore pre-Series A round that Navana raised in July 2025. Antler India led that round, with Ajay Agarwal, Ronnie Screwvala and Sandeep Singhal participating. At the time, ETtech reported that Navana had more than 40 clients and voice bots operating in more than 12 languages.
The latest round therefore comes after the company has spent the intervening period building deployments rather than only developing an early-stage product. Its reported 100 million-plus minutes of voice AI usage provides the clearest measure the company has disclosed of that activity so far.
Regulation Shapes Enterprise AI
Data handling is particularly important when voice AI is deployed by financial institutions. RBI’s Digital Lending Guidelines require data related to digital lending to be stored on servers located in India.
The requirement is specific to the digital-lending framework and should not be read as a blanket India-server mandate for every voice AI deployment across the BFSI sector.
RBI’s separate 2023 directions on IT outsourcing also make clear that outsourcing technology services does not reduce a regulated entity’s responsibility towards customers or its regulatory obligations.
For Navana, that makes its emphasis on enterprise deployment, data control and Indian-language speech models a central part of its pitch to regulated customers.
The immediate task after the new funding is straightforward: expand those deployments while continuing to improve the underlying speech technology. The company now has a larger pool of capital, an established set of BFSI customers and more than 100 million reported voice AI minutes behind it.
Also Read: CJP Seeks Accountability Over Satya Niketan Collapse, Calls For Delhi PG Safety Audit
