Bolna nabs $6.3M from General Catalyst for its India-focused voice orchestration platform

Industry reports and the growth of voice modeling companies in the Indian market suggest that there is a growing demand for voice AI solutions in the country. Voice is a popular medium for communication between people and businesses in India. That’s why companies and startups are eager to use voice AI to be more efficient in customer support, sales, customer acquisition, recruiting, and training.

But recognizing market demand is one thing; proving that companies will pay is another. Y Combinator rejected the application Bolnaa voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan five times before finally accepting it in the fall of 2025, skeptical that its founders could turn interest into income.

“When we applied for Y Combinator, the feedback we got was ‘great to see you have a product that can create realistic voice agents, but Indian companies aren’t going to pay, and you’re not going to make any money from this,’” Wagh told TechCrunch.

The startup applied for the fall batch with the same idea, but was able to demonstrate that it has been bringing in more than $25,000 in revenue every month for the past several months. At the time, the company was running $100 pilots to help users build voting agents. Now the startup is pricing these pilots at $500.

The momentum has continued. The startup said Tuesday it has raised a $6.3 million 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 involves individual investors including Aarthi Ramamurthy, Arpan Sheth, Sriwatsan Krishnan, Ravi Iyer and Taro Fukuyama.

The product and the customers

Bolna is building an orchestration layer – essentially a platform that connects and manages various AI voice technologies – similar to startups like Vapi, LiveKit and VoiceRun, to accommodate the quirks of interactions in India, including noise cancellation, getting verification on caller ID platform Truecaller and handling mixed languages.

In terms of functionality, the company has built in specific nuances for Indian users, such as speaking numbers in English regardless of the core language, or allowing keyboard input for longer inputs.

Wagh noted that Bolna’s key difference is that it makes it easy for users to build voice agents just by describing them, even if they don’t know much about the underlying technology, and start using them for calls. The company said 75% of its revenue comes from self-service customers.

He also said that because Bolna is an orchestration layer, it is not dependent on a single model, so companies can easily switch if a better model is available.

“Our platform allows customers to easily switch models or even use different models for different locations to get the best out of them. An orchestration layer is necessary for companies to ensure they get the best models because one model can be better today and another can be better tomorrow,” said Wagh.

The company has a range of clients including car sales platform Spinny, on-demand home help startup Snabbit, drinks companies and dating apps. Most of these are small to medium businesses using Bolna’s self-service platform.

In addition, Bolna strives for large business deals. For these large enterprises and custom implementations, Bolna has a team of forward-deployable engineers: specialists who work directly with customers on site or closely with their teams. The startup has signed two major enterprises as paying customers and has four more in the pilot phase. Currently, Bolna employs nine engineers and is adding two to three people to that team every month to support this business momentum.

Bolna has seen steady growth in both call volume and revenue. It says it now handles more than 200,000 calls per day and is on the verge of surpassing $700,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company noted that while 60% to 70% of call volume is in English or Hindi, the number of other regional languages ​​is steadily increasing.

Akarsh Shrivastava, who is part of General Catalyst’s investment team, said the company found Bolna impressive because its orchestration layer is flexible for different types of customers.

“Bolna gives you the freedom to choose any model and has a stack behind it to mold it to your needs. It is a good option for people who want to own a piece of the stack, want flexibility in choosing models and want to be able to maintain products themselves,” Shrivastava told TechCrunch during a call.