Equal AI raises $30 million to screen calls so Indians don’t have to do it

In India, consumers receive a lot of calls every day, from spam and scams to delivery people and financial services companies trying to contact them. There are apps like Truecaller and the government’s Caller Name Display (CNAP) system to identify the caller, but knowing the caller’s name is often not enough. That’s why Equal AI is creating an assistant that can take calls on your behalf, collect information, and tell you why someone is calling.

The app is currently available on Android, and since its launch last year, it has grown to more than 1 million monthly active users and more than 300,000 daily active users, he says. The app scans the call and shows why someone is calling you.

The dialer displays quick response options such as “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor,” and the AI ​​reads them back to the caller. You can also write a personalized message for the AI ​​to read. The app records the call, and users can see the recording and transcription history with a summary in the app.

Equal AI said today it has 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 Indian fintech company PhonePe founder Sameer Nigam, Airtel Family Office’s Zubin Bharti Mittal, Skyflow AI co-founder Anshu Sharma, Meta India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya Devanathan, and CtrlS Datacenters president Sridhar Pinnapureddy. With the new funding, the company has raised more than $42 million to date.

The round is structured in three tranches, with the startup carrying a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it achieves pre-set goals — a growing but still uncommon approach as startups sell shares at different prices during the same round. The structure has an unusual feature: it allows the startup to declare the highest valuation achieved, even if the bulk of the shares are sold at a lower price. Equal AI declined to provide its specific ratings.

The startup was founded by Keshav Reddy in 2022. Reddy comes from the family behind the Indian conglomerate GVK, which has holdings in infrastructure, energy and healthcare. Equal started as a data exchange for financial services and still provides data for financial analysis and know-your-customer (KYC) verification services to employers.

“We always wanted to be a customer-facing company, and with Equal AI, the first use case we launched was a call assistant because we realized that users were getting a high volume of calls for financial services or job opportunities. If you’re buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls over the course of a week, which is hard to handle for a human,” founder Reddy told TechCrunch about why he started the company there.

The app currently only screens unknown calls, but the company plans to offer the ability to screen calls from known numbers as well. The company also wants the AI ​​assistant to take proactive actions on the user’s behalf — such as texting the delivery person your address (with consent) or making outbound calls to book appointments. The startup said it is also working on an iOS version of the app and a paid subscription tier with more features.

Equal AI uses a combination of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech generation models with its own coordination layer. English language support is important, but consumers in India often speak in their native language or mix multiple languages ​​in a single sentence – a phenomenon called code mixing. Equal AI says it has built support for more than 10 languages ​​with this in mind.

The startup has intense competition. Both Google and Apple have call screening products. Truecaller, which is already a household name in India, is building its own AI assistant features. In the US, Cloaked, a privacy startup backed by a16z, launched call screening last year. Tiago Viana, global co-president of Prosus Ventures, said Equal’s understanding of the local context gives it an advantage.

“Equal AI promises to screen calls for you and provide context on why someone is calling. We believe that if an app works well in a few use cases, it can quickly become popular in a niche and create user stickiness to expand into different regions later,” he told TechCrunch over the phone.

Prosus invests in AI assistant startups focused on local markets. Its portfolio includes Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia. Both were caught up in Meta’s ban on third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, which serves as a cautionary tale for adoption of the platform. Equal AI said it didn’t want to create that kind of dependency — which is why it relied on calls and its own app rather than a messaging platform.