Bolna has raised $6.3 million from General Catalyst for its India-focused voice calling platform

Companies reports and the size of audio industry in the Indian market points out that there is a growing demand for AI voice solutions in the country. Voice is a popular means of communication between people and businesses in India. This is why businesses and startups are eager to use the power of AI to improve customer service, sales, customer acquisition, lending, and education.

But realizing market demand is one thing – making sure businesses will pay is another. Y Combinator rejected the request from Painfulthe vocal music startup created by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before accepting the fall 2025 batch, doubts that the founders can turn interest into money.

“When we applied to Y-Combinator, the feedback we got was, ‘It’s great to see that you have a product that can make voice assistants, but Indian businesses won’t pay for it, and you won’t make money on it,'” Wagh told TechCrunch.

The startup used the same concept of the fall team but was able to show that it had more than $25,000 coming in every month for the past few months. At the time, the company was running a $100 pilot to help users create audio. Now, the startup is paying those pilots at $500.

The rush is on. The founders said on Tuesday that they raised a $6.3M seed round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Y Combinator, Blume Ventures, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, Transpose Capital, and Eight Capital. The round also includes individual investors, including Arthi Ramamurthy, Arpan Sheth, Sriwatsan Krishnan, Ravi Iyer, and Taro Fukuyam.

Products and customers

Bolna is developing a suite of tools – specifically a platform that connects and manages AI-based technologies – such as startups such as Vapi, LiveKit, and VoiceRunto adapt to India’s challenges, including noise cancellation, authentication on the Truecaller caller ID app, and different languages.

Wisely, the company has created special nuances for Indian users, such as numbers speaking in English regardless of the main language, or allowing long-term entry of keys.

Wagh said that Bolna’s biggest difference is that it makes it easy for users to create voice listeners by simply specifying them, even if they don’t know much about the basic technology, and start using them for calls. The company said 75% of its revenue comes from self-service customers.

He added that because Bolna is an orchestration group, it doesn’t rely on a single model, so businesses can easily adapt when a better model becomes available.

“Our platform allows customers to easily change models or use different models for different areas to achieve better results. The orchestration team is important for businesses to ensure that they are getting the best models because one model may be good today and another may be good tomorrow,” said Wagh.

The company has a wide range of clients including car sales platform Spinny, home support startup Quicklybeverage companies, and dating apps. Most of these are small to medium businesses that use the Bolna platform.

On his own, Bolna is pursuing big business. For these large businesses and established practices, Bolna has a team of leading experts – experts who work directly with customers on site or near their teams. The startup has signed two large businesses as paying customers and has four more in the pipeline. Currently, Bolna employs nine engineers on forward deployment and is adding two to three people to the team each month to help push the business forward.

Bolna has seen steady growth in both phone and revenue. It now handles over 200,000 calls per day and is about to cross $700,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company realized that while 60-70% of call volumes are in English or Hindi, other regional languages ​​are slowly picking up.

Akarsh Shrivastava, chief investment officer at General Catalyst, said the company found Bolna interesting because its orchestration team is flexible for different customers.

“Bolna gives you the freedom to choose any color and has a stack behind it to shape it according to your needs.” It’s a great option for people who want to have a different part of the stack, want flexibility in model selection, and want to be able to manage those things themselves,” Shrivastava told TechCrunch over the phone.