In India, consumers receive many calls every day, from spam and scams to delivery drivers and financial services companies trying to contact them. There are apps like Truecaller and the government Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system to identify who is calling, but knowing the name of the caller is often not enough. That’s why Same AI You’re creating an assistant that can receive calls on your behalf, collect information, and tell you why someone is calling.
The app is currently available on Android and, since launching last year, has grown to more than one million monthly active users and more than 300,000 daily active users, it says. The application filters the call and shows the reason why someone is calling you.
The dialer displays quick response options like “Leave delivery near door” or “Give it to neighbor,” and the AI reads them to the caller. You can also write a custom 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 that 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 PhonePe founder Sameer Nigam, Airtel Family Office’s Zubin Bharti Mittal, Skyflow AI co-founder Anshu Sharma, Meta India and Southeast Asia vice president 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, and the startup has a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it hits predetermined targets, a growing but still uncommon approach in which startups sell shares at different prices. within the same round. The structure has an unusual quirk: it allows a startup to announce the highest valuation achieved, even if most of the equity was sold at a lower price. Equal AI declined to provide its specific assessments.
The startup was founded by Keshav Reddy in 2022. Reddy comes from the family behind the Indian conglomerate GVK, which has stakes in infrastructure, energy and healthcare. Equal started as a data sharing company for financial services and still offers data for financial analysis and know-your-customer (KYC) verification services for 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 receive a lot of calls for financial services or job offers. If you are buying car insurance, you may receive 20 calls in a week, and that is difficult for a human being to address,” founder Reddy told TechCrunch about why the company started there.
Currently, the app only filters unknown calls, but the company plans to introduce the ability to filter calls from known numbers as well. The company also wants the AI assistant to take proactive steps on a user’s behalf, such as texting their address to a delivery driver (with consent) or making calls to schedule 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 orchestration layer. English support is important, but consumers in India often speak in their native language or combine multiple languages into 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 tough competition. Both Google and Apple have call detection products. Truecaller, which is already a household name in India, has been developing its own AI assistant features. In the US, Cloaked, a privacy startup backed by a16z, also launched call monitoring last year. Thiago Viana, global co-head of Prosus Ventures, said Equal’s understanding of the local context gives it an advantage.
“Equal AI promises to filter calls for you and provide context on why someone is calling. We believe that if an app works well in some use cases, it can quickly become popular in its niche and create user stickiness to expand into different areas later,” Reddy told TechCrunch over the phone.
Prosus has been investing in AI assistant startups that focus on local markets. Its portfolio includes companies based in Spain Luzia and based in Latin America the scarf. They were both trapped in goal ban in third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, serving as a warning about platform dependency. Equal AI said it didn’t want to create that kind of dependency, which is why it relied on calls and its own app instead of leveraging a messaging platform.
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