Gnani.ai bags $10M in Series B funding round

Bengaluru-based voice AI company Gnani.ai has raised $10 million as part of its Series B funding, led by Aavishkaar Capital with participation from existing backer Info Edge Ventures.

The AI startup said that the fresh capital will be used to speed up global expansion, strengthen agentic AI capabilities, widen multilingual and industry-specific products, and add engineering and product talent.

Gnani.ai is not a new entrant testing the market. Founded in 2016 by Ganesh Gopalan and Ananth Nagaraj, it builds voice-first AI for enterprises. The company claims its platform handles more than 30 million voice interactions a day in more than 12 languages for over 200 enterprise customers.

It is one of the startups selected under the Government of India AI Mission for sovereign foundational models. The AI firm recently launched Inya VoiceOS, a five billion parameter voice to voice model, and Vachana STT and Vachana TTS, tools that convert speech to text and text to speech. Voice AI is becoming more useful when it works across languages, accents and low-friction customer journeys, rather than only as a novelty layer on top of chatbots.

“Deep-tech is no longer a niche — it is becoming central to solving the defining challenges of our time: agricultural resilience, financial inclusion, climate adaptation, and equitable access to services,” said Shilpa Maheshwari, Managing Director, Aavishkaar Capital.

Aavishkaar has separately said it plans a Next Gen Fund in 2026 with a deeptech focus. India’s AI and deep tech funding market has been active, with more than $850 million in capital commitments to the India Deep Tech Alliance in November 2025. Info Edge recently committed up to Rs 250 crore to A88 Fund I, an early-stage deeptech fund.

“Gnani.ai has built a world-class voice AI platform positioning itself as the leader both in enterprise as well as sovereign AI categories. We believe the company is well-positioned to become a global leader in agentic voice AI,” noted Chinmaya Sharma, Partner at Info Edge Ventures.

Several other Indian AI companies have raised capital recently, signalling sustained investor interest in the sector. AI startup Emergent raised $70 million in a Series B round led by SoftBank Vision Fund and Khosla Ventures, after raising $23 million just months earlier, with the company focusing on coding agents and AI tools that automate software development.

Meanwhile, enterprise-focused AI startup Deccan AI raised $25 million in a round led by A91 Partners with participation from Prosus Ventures and Susquehanna International Group, with the company aiming to build high-accuracy AI systems for enterprise and frontier model labs.

Major AI-related investment pledges around the India AI summit underline a broader shift in where the money is going, with investors increasingly backing core AI infrastructure, models, compute and enterprise tools rather than only consumer-facing applications.

At the same time, new pools of capital are being created specifically for AI startups in India. Bajaj Finserv recently said it plans to launch a dedicated private equity fund focused entirely on artificial intelligence investments while also making direct investments into early-stage AI startups.