India’s Ringg Secures Peak XV Support as It Expands Voice AI Beyond Traditional Phone Calls

A recent survey by Truecaller reveals that over 76% of Indian consumers prefer interacting with businesses via phone calls. This trend highlights a significant opportunity for deploying voice AI to enhance support and outreach services in India. The voice AI startup Ringg, currently managing 20 million call attempts monthly, is optimistic about future growth and has secured additional funding to support its expansion.

In a recent announcement, Ringg disclosed that it has obtained $10 million from Peak XV Partners, supplementing its earlier Series A funding of $5.5 million, which brings the total of this funding round to $15.5 million.

Initially launched as a text-to-speech company named DesiVocal, Ringg’s founders shifted focus to developing voice AI applications for businesses after discovering the high costs of creating proprietary speech models. The fintech platform Cred was their inaugural client, and Ringg has since partnered with various notable Indian startups, including Flipkart, Practo, Groww, and PolicyBazaar.

“Initially, we concentrated on high-volume, low-complexity operations such as outbound calls, lead qualification, and loan collections. However, we recognized these services lacked longevity and would mainly compete on pricing,” co-founder Siddharth Tripathi explained.

While Ringg still offers some simpler services, it is now targeting more intricate processes, such as appointment scheduling in healthcare, recovering abandoned shopping carts for e-commerce, and conducting onboarding/KYC checks for fintech applications.

According to Tripathi, Ringg’s voice agents are currently employed across 1,200 medical facilities through the healthcare application Practo, assisting patients in scheduling appointments and following up on post-visit procedures.

Although voice calls constitute over 70% of Ringg’s operations, the company is diversifying into other communication channels, including chat and WhatsApp, and is automating support requests for clients like Shell through browser interfaces.

“We aim to position ourselves as a platform that enables agents to deliver results rather than merely providing voice agents for businesses,” Tripathi added.

Ringg primarily caters to Indian clients, along with a few in the Middle East and the United States. However, the startup is not focusing on direct sales to American companies; instead, it seeks collaborations with Global Capability Centers in India that serve as offshore resources for multinational corporations, facilitating combined automation and human support services.

Tripathi noted that the company develops its own speech recognition and generating models and aspires to eventually manage the complete voice stack, including infrastructure and deployment. For now, due to high costs, the solution functions as an orchestration layer that directs tasks to various models based on specific needs.

Rishen Kapoor, a principal at Peak XV, remarked that Ringg’s origins as a research lab developing its models lend it the technical prowess to effectively manage complex enterprise workflows.

“Their technical capabilities enable them to handle sophisticated enterprise tasks such as merchant onboarding and various support levels, achieving quality and consistency,” Kapoor shared.

The voice AI sector in India is highly competitive, with various model creators like Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Cartesia, and local companies like Sarvam and Smallest.ai vying for leadership. Additionally, orchestration-focused enterprises like Bolna and Blue Machines are targeting the same niche as Ringg, while specialized companies like Gnani and Arrowhead concentrate heavily on the finance sector.

The evolving landscape of this layered stack—comprising model creators, orchestrators, and application-focused firms—highlights the significance of customer relationships and outcomes in securing business success.

Currently, Ringg employs 40 people, with over 15 of those hired in the past three months. The company is looking for forward-deployed engineers skilled in both technology and product management, as well as researchers aimed at reducing operational costs of its models.