Industry reports and the growth of voice model companies in the Indian market suggest a growing demand for voice AI solutions in the country. Voice is a popular medium for communication among people and businesses in India. That is why enterprises and startups are eager to use voice AI to improve efficiency in areas like customer support, sales, customer acquisition, hiring, and training.
But recognizing market demand is one thing, while proving businesses will pay is another. Y Combinator rejected the application from Bolna, a voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before finally accepting it into the fall 2025 batch. They were skeptical the founders could turn interest into revenue.
When applying to Y Combinator, the feedback received was that while the product could create realistic voice agents, Indian enterprises were not going to pay for it and the startup would not make money. The startup applied with the same idea for the fall batch but was then able to show it had revenue of more than twenty-five thousand dollars coming in every month for the preceding few months. At that time, the company was running one hundred dollar pilots to help users build voice agents. Now, the startup prices those pilots at five hundred dollars.
The momentum has continued. The startup said it has raised a six point three million dollar 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 individual investors such as Arthi Ramamurthy, Arpan Sheth, Sriwatsan Krishnan, Ravi Iyer, and Taro Fukuyama.
Bolna is building an orchestration layer, which is essentially a platform that connects and manages different AI voice technologies. This is similar to other startups, but it is tailored to suit the idiosyncrasies of interactions in India. This includes features like noise cancellation, getting verification on the caller ID platform Truecaller, and handling mixed languages.
Feature-wise, the company has built specific nuances for Indian users. Examples include speaking numbers in English regardless of the core language, or allowing for keypad input for longer inputs.
A key differentiation for Bolna is that it makes it easy for users to build voice agents by just describing them, even without deep knowledge of the underlying technology, and then start using them for calls. The company said that seventy-five percent of its revenue comes from self-serve customers.
Because Bolna is an orchestration layer, it does not depend on a single AI model. This allows enterprises to easily switch when a better model becomes available. The platform allows customers to switch models easily or use different models for different locales to get the best performance. An orchestration layer is necessary for enterprises to ensure they are getting the best models, as one model can be better today and another one better tomorrow.
The company has a range of clients including the car reselling platform Spinny, the on-demand house-help startup Snabbit, beverage companies, and dating apps. Most of these are small to mid-size businesses that use Bolna’s self-serve platform.
Separately, Bolna is pursuing large enterprise deals. For these large enterprises and custom implementations, Bolna has a team of forward-deployed engineers. These are specialists who work directly with clients on-site or closely with their teams. The startup has signed two large enterprises as paying customers and has four more in the pilot stage. Currently, Bolna employs nine forward-deployed engineers and is adding two to three people to that team every month to support this enterprise push.
Bolna has seen steady growth in both call volumes and revenue. It is now handling over two hundred thousand calls per day and is on the verge of crossing seven hundred thousand dollars in annual recurring revenue. The company noted that while sixty to seventy percent of call volume is in English or Hindi, other regional languages are steadily rising.
Akarsh Shrivastava, who is part of the investment team at General Catalyst, said the firm found Bolna impressive because its orchestration layer is flexible for various kinds of customers. Bolna allows the freedom to choose any model and has a stack behind it to mould it according to specific requirements. It is a good option for people who want to own some part of the stack, want flexibility in model picking, and want to be able to maintain those products themselves.