India's contact centres take billions of calls a year in 22 languages and more than 40 dialects. In banking, insurance and healthcare, a misheard word is more than an annoyance. It can mean a wrong loan, a missed claim, a compliance breach or just sheer disrespect. Most voice AI was trained on American English, and stumbles the moment a caller switches from Marathi to Hinglish mid-sentence.

Raoul, a second-time founder who earlier built a mobile gaming studio, along with his brother Jai, a software engineer from the University of Michigan, decided to build the whole thing themselves. Speech recognition, voice synthesis and language models, trained on more than 50,000 hours of real Indian speech and deployed inside each customer's own private cloud. When it comes to speech in Indian languages, Navana is 30% more accurate than anyone else.

Bajaj Finserv, Ujjivan and Jana Small Finance Bank now trust Navana with their customers' voices. A farmer in Vidarbha or a shopkeeper in Madurai speaks to their bank as naturally as anyone in Mumbai, and is served just as well. Recently, Navana raised 40 Cr led by Ronnie Screwvala to accelerate growth and become the de-facto voice AI for Bharat.

FOUNDERS

1. Raoul Nanavati, Co-founder & CEO

2. Jai Nanavati, Co-founder & CTO

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