In India, consumers receive numerous calls every day, ranging from spam and scams to delivery people and financial services companies. Although apps like Truecaller and the government’s Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system can identify who is calling, simply knowing the caller’s name is often not enough. That’s why Equal AI creates an assistant that answers calls on your behalf, gathers information, and tells you why someone is calling.
The app is currently available on Android, and since launching last year it has reportedly grown to over 1 million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users. The app screens calls and displays the reason someone is calling.
The dialer displays quick response options such as “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Pass it to a neighbor,” which the AI reads back to the caller. You can also enter a custom message for the AI to read. The app records calls and users can view the recording and transcription history along with a summary in the app.
Equal AI announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital, with participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors include Sameer Nigam, founder of Indian fintech PhonePe, Zubin Bharti Mittal of Airtel Family Office, Anshu Sharma, co-founder of Skyflow AI, Sandhya Devanathan, vice president of Meta India and Southeast Asia, and Sridhar Pinnapureddy, chairman of CtrlS Datacenters. The new funding brings the company to more than $42 million to date.
This round consists of three tranches, with startups carrying out different valuations at each stage depending on whether they have achieved pre-determined goals or not. This is where a startup sells shares at different prices within the same round, but it’s still an uncommon approach. This structure has unusual features. This means that a startup can advertise the highest valuation it has ever achieved, even if the majority of its stake has been sold at a lower price. Equal AI declined to give a specific valuation.
The startup was founded by Keshav Reddy in 2022. Reddy comes from the GVK family, an Indian conglomerate with holdings across infrastructure, energy and healthcare. Equal started as a data sharing company for financial services and still provides data for financial analysis and provides know-your-customer (KYC) verification services for employers.
“We’ve always wanted to be a customer-facing company, and the first use case we launched with Equal AI was call assistant, because we realized that users were getting a ton of calls about financial services or job postings. If you’re getting car insurance, you might get 20 calls a week, which is hard for a human to handle,” founder Reddy told TechCrunch about why the company started there.
Currently, the app only blocks unknown calls, but the company is planning to introduce a feature that will also block calls from known numbers. The company also wants the AI assistant to take proactive steps on your behalf, such as texting your address to a delivery person (with your consent) or making an outbound call to book an appointment. The startup said it is also developing an iOS version of the app and a paid subscription tier with more features.
Equal AI uses a mix of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models with its own orchestration layer. While English support is important, consumers in India often speak their native language or mix multiple languages in a single sentence. This phenomenon is called code mixing. Equal AI says it built support for more than 10 languages with this in mind.
Startups face fierce competition. Both Google and Apple have call screening products. Already popular in India, Truecaller has been building its own AI assistant. In the US, a16z-backed privacy startup Cloaked also began screening calls last year. Thiago Viana, global co-head of Prosus Ventures, said Equal’s strength lies in its understanding of local contexts.
“Equal AI promises to filter out calls and provide context as to why someone is calling. We believe that if an app performs well in a few use cases, it can quickly gain popularity in its niche and build user loyalty to expand into other areas later,” Reddy told TechCrunch by phone.
Prosus has been investing in AI-assisted startups focused on local markets. The portfolio includes Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia. Both were caught up in Meta’s ban on third-party AI bots from WhatsApp, which serves as a warning about platform dependence. Equal AI said it didn’t want to create that kind of dependency. So rather than piggybacking on a messaging platform, we built it around calling and our own app.
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