Voice AI startup Bolna raises $6.3 million from General Catalyst, others

Voice AI startup Bolna has raised $6.3 million in a funding round led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm General Catalyst. The round also saw participation from Y Combinator, Blume Ventures, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, Transpose Capital, and Eight Capital, along with angel investors.

The company plans to deploy the capital to scale its engineering and deployment teams, invest in proprietary AI and machine learning capabilities for vernacular voice interactions, and strengthen its enterprise-grade infrastructure to handle large-scale use cases.

“Indian businesses make over a billion calls every day, or close to 30 billion a month. According to some recent industry reports, voice AI is currently used for only around 20 million calls a month, of which Bolna handles about two million. Which means that there’s significant headroom for expansion,” founder and chief executive Maitreya Wagh told ET.


Founded in 2024, the Bengaluru-based startup provides a self-serve platform that enables enterprises to design, deploy, and monitor voice AI agents without lengthy implementation timelines or the need for specialised AI skills.

“Around 75% of our users use the self-serve tool because they want complete control over the agent. The remaining 25%, our largest clients, including some listed companies we work with, opt for a fully forward-deployed service, where we build and deploy the agent for them,” he said.

Since its first commercial rollout in May 2025, Bolna has gone from managing about 1,500 calls a day to more than 200,000.

The startup has over 1,050 paying customers spanning sectors such as ecommerce, BFSI, logistics, recruitment, and education, with its clientele ranging from enterprises like Varun Beverages to startups such as Spinny and Snabbit.

“If you look at the time spent on the phone, currently human callers cost around Rs 4-5 per minute. Once you factor in onboarding, attrition, middle management, recruitment, training, vacations, and other overheads, the cost rises to about Rs 6-7 a minute. At scale, our end-to-end offering including telephony, analytics, and everything else comes to as little as Rs 2.5 per minute,” Wagh said.

The platform supports over 10 Indian languages — English, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, and Bengali, and caters to customers across more than 10 countries, with India as its primary market.

According to Wagh, the company’s revenue stood at about $1,500 in May 2025 and rose to $56,000 by December. “We're close to an ARR of around $700,000 right now.”

Commenting on the investment, Neeraj Arora, CEO India, MENA, and managing director, General Catalyst said, “Bolna makes it easy to build and deploy voice AI agents, and we foresee them becoming the go-to platform for businesses automating their calls with voice AI.”

“India has 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects. Building voice AI that actually works here is a hard problem, and they were solving it while generating revenues,” said Tom Blomfield, group partner, Y-Combinator.