GoKawiilMore than 76% of consumers in India prefer talking to businesses over a phone call, according to a recent study from Truecaller. Since voice is still consumers’ preferred way to communicate, that leaves a big opportunity to automate support and outreach calls using voice AI in the country. Voice AI startup Ringg, which already processes 20 million call attempts a month, is betting that volume keeps climbing over the coming months, and it just raised more money on that belief.
The company said today it has landed $10 million from Peak XV Partners as an extension of its Series A. It had previously raised $5.5 million in a Series A round earlier this year, bringing the round’s total to $15.5 million.
Ringg started life as a text-to-speech startup called DesiVocal, but training its own speech models proved expensive, so the founders moved up the stack — building voice AI agents for enterprises instead. Indian fintech Cred became its first customer, and Ringg has since signed Indian startups like Flipkart, Practo, Groww, and Policybazaar.
“At the start, we were doing high-volume, low-complexity use cases like outbound calling, lead qualification, loan collection, and more. We quickly realized these are not sticky use cases, and so it’s always going to be a price game,” the startup’s co-founder Siddharth Tripathi told TechCrunch.
Ringg still serves some of those simpler use cases, but it has set its sights on more complex workflows: appointment booking for healthcare clinics, abandoned-cart recovery for e-commerce sites, and onboarding/KYC (“know your customer”) checks for fintech apps.
Tripathi said Ringg’s voice agent now runs across 1,200 clinics for the healthcare app Practo, helping patients book visits or follow up on next steps post-visit.
Voice calls still make up over 70% of Ringg’s business, but the startup has started branching into other channels, including chat and WhatsApp. For some clients like Shell, it’s also automating browser-based support requests.
“We are trying to position ourselves as a platform for agents that bring outcomes or get things done rather than voice agents for enterprises,” Tripathi said.
Most of Ringg’s customers are based in India, with a handful in the Middle East and the U.S. But the startup isn’t trying to sell directly to U.S. companies; instead, it wants to partner with global capability centers in India — the offshore hubs multinationals increasingly lean on for back-office and support work — to sell automation capacity alongside human support.
Tripathi said the company builds its own speech recognition and generation models and would eventually like to own the full voice stack, including infrastructure and deployment. For now, though, that remains too costly, so the product works as an orchestration layer, routing tasks to different models depending on the use case.
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