Equal AI secures $30M to scale AI call assistant, expand into new services
Equal AI’s Series B round was co-led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital, with participation from Think Investments, Valiant VC, Sameer Nigam and Zubin Mittal.
Consumer AI platform Equal AI has raised $30 million in Series B funding in tranches co-led by Prosus Ventures, the early-stage arm of Prosus, and Tomales Bay Capital, a San Francisco-based global investment firm.
The round also included Think Investments, Valiant Fund, Zubin Mittal of Airtel, Sameer Nigam of PhonePe, and other strategic backers.
The funding follows the $10-million Series A round that Prosus and Tomales Bay co-led in November 2024.
Bengaluru-based Equal AI was started in 2022 as a data-sharing and identity infrastructure company. The company says the capital will help deepen its AI call assistant offering and widen its reach into communications, financial services, lifestyle, and concierge services.
The firm is building a product layer that sits on the phone and acts on behalf of the user. Its AI assistant screens spam calls, understands who is calling, interprets intent, and carries out tasks for the user.
Equal claims it has more than 1 million monthly active users and 3,50,000 daily active users. The company says it serves more than 350 enterprise customers across banking, lending, insurance, telecom and digital platforms, with access to 50+ identity databases and 4,000+ API providers, processing more than 1 billion transactions a year with a 97% KYC success rate.
Equal AI's founder Keshav Reddy said the company began with a belief that secure, consent-driven data sharing could unlock new opportunities for Indians, and that belief has since produced two engines, the consumer AI product and the enterprise platform.
“Equal has consistently been ahead of the curve - first in reimagining identity and then data sharing in India, and now is building one of the country's most ambitious consumer AI Assistants. Equal AI is a category-defining bet on what voice AI can do for everyday Indians,” said Thiago Viana, Global Co-Head, Prosus Ventures.
Viana believes the startup will accelerate to become India’s AI assistant—an AI lifestyle concierge for 100 million Indians.
Iqbaljit Kahlon, Founder and Managing Partner, Tomales Bay Capital, said the startup is building the layer through which hundreds of millions of Indians will interact with their digital lives.
Equal AI's growth points to a wider shift in consumer technology, where voice, rather than text, is becoming the more natural interface for many users in India. Its fund raise also reflects the broader funding environment that is increasingly backing more AI companies.
Recent funding shows that capital remains available for products with clear use cases. In January, Emergent raised $70 million in a Series B round led by SoftBank Vision Fund and Khosla Ventures, while Google and Accel have announced a plan to co-invest up to $2 million each in early-stage Indian AI startups.
Investors are backing AI businesses that solve everyday problems and build India-specific infrastructure, rather than generic chatbots.
Meanwhile, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRA)) continues to accelerate anti-spam measures, including the DND (do not disturb) system that lets consumers register preferences by dialling 1909 or using the TRAI app.