Consumers in India receive many calls every day, from spam and scams to delivery people and financial services companies trying to get in touch with them. There are apps like Truecaller and the government’s Caller Name Identification (CNAP) system to identify who is calling, but knowing the caller’s name is often not enough. Therefore Equal AI creates an assistant that can take calls on your behalf, gather information, and tell you why someone is calling.
The app is currently available on Android and has reached over one million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users since its launch last year. The app screens the call and shows why someone is calling you.
The dialer displays quick response options such as “Leave the delivery at the door” or “Give it to a neighbor” and the AI reads them to the caller. You can also write a personalized message for the AI to read. The app records the call and users can view the recording and transcription history with a summary in the app.
Equal AI said today it raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital, with participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors include Sameer Nigam, founder of Indian fintech PhonePe, Zubin Bharti Mittal of Airtel Family Office, Anshu Sharma, co-founder of Skyflow AI, Sandhya Devanathan, vice president of Meta India and Southeast Asia, and Sridhar Pinnapureddy, chairman of CtrlS Datacenters. With the new funding, the company has raised more than $42 million to date.
The round is structured in three tranches, with the startup taking a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it meets pre-set targets — a growing but still unusual approach in which startups sell equity at different prices. in the same round. The structure has an unusual quirk: it allows a startup to advertise the highest valuation ever achieved, even if the bulk of the equity is sold at a lower price. Equal AI declined to provide specific estimates.
The startup was founded in 2022 by Keshav Reddy. Reddy is from the family behind GVK, an Indian conglomerate with holdings in infrastructure, energy and healthcare. Equal started as a data sharing company for financial services and still offers data for financial analysis and know customer (KYC) verification services for employers.
“We’ve always wanted to be a customer-facing company, and the first use case we launched with Equal AI was a call assistant because we realized that users get a ton of calls for financial services or jobs. If you’re buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls in a week, and that’s hard for one person to handle,” founder Reddy told TechCrunch where he started the company.
The app currently only checks unknown calls, but the company plans to introduce the ability to check calls from known numbers as well. The company also wants the AI assistant to take active action on the user’s behalf – for example, sending a message (with consent) to someone who delivers your address or making outbound calls to book an appointment. The startup also said it is working on an iOS version of the app and a paid subscription tier with more features.
Equal AI uses a mix of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models with its own orchestration layer. Supporting English is important, but consumers in India often speak in their native language or mix more than one language in a sentence – a phenomenon called code-mixing. Equal AI says it’s built support for more than 10 languages with this in mind.
There is serious competition in the startup. Google and Apple both have call verification products. Already popular in India, Truecaller is developing its own AI assistant features. In the US, a16z-backed privacy startup Cloaked also launched call screening last year. Equal’s understanding of the local context gives it an edge, said Tiago Viana, global co-head of Prosus Ventures.
“Equal AI promises to screen calls for you and provide context as to why someone is calling. We think if the app does well in a few use cases, it can quickly become popular in its niche and create user stickiness to expand into different areas later,” Reddy told TechCrunch by phone.
Prosus invests in AI assistant startups focusing on local markets. His portfolio also includes Spain Luzia and located in Latin America scarf. Both were caught Meta ban In third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, it acts as a warning for platform dependency. Equal AI said it didn’t want to create that kind of addiction — so instead of piggybacking on a messaging platform, it built around calls and its own app.
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