In India, consumers receive many calls every day, from spam and scams to delivery people and financial service companies trying to contact them. There are apps like Truecaller and the government’s Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) program to identify who is calling, but knowing the caller’s name is often not enough. That’s why Equal AI is creating an assistant that can take calls on your behalf, gather information, and tell you why someone is calling.
The app is currently available on Android, and since its launch last year, it has grown to more than a million monthly active users and more than 300,000 daily active users, it said. The app checks the call and shows the reason why someone is calling you.
The dialer shows quick response options like “Leave a delivery at the door” or “Give it to a neighbor,” and the AI reads it back to the caller. You can also type a custom message for the AI to read. The app records the call, and users can see the recording and transcription history at a glance in the app.
Equal AI said today 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 Indian fintech PhonePe founder Sameer Nigam, Zubin Bharti Mittal from Airtel Family Office, Skyflow AI founder Anshu Sharma, Meta India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya Devanathan, and CtrlS Datacenters’ Chairman Sridhar Pinnapureddy. With the new funding, the company has raised more than $42 million to date.
The round is organized into three stages, with startups holding different valuations in each stage depending on whether they reach a predetermined target – a growing but still unusual practice where startups sell equity at different prices within the same round. The structure has an unusual quirk: it allows the initiator to advertise the highest amount received, even if the total amount was sold at a low price. Equal AI declined to provide its specific estimates.
The startup was founded by Keshav Reddy in 2022. Reddy comes from the family behind the Indian conglomerate GVK, which has assets across infrastructure, energy, and healthcare. Equal started as a financial services data sharing company and still provides financial analysis data and know your customer (KYC) services for employers.
“We’ve always wanted to be a customer-facing company, and with Equal AI, the first use case we introduced was a call assistant because we realized that users were getting a ton of calls for financial services or job openings. If you’re buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls during the week, and that’s hard to deal with,” founder Reddy told TechCrunch about why the company started there.
The app currently only checks unknown calls, but the company plans to introduce the ability to check calls from known numbers as well. The company also wants the AI assistant to take immediate action for the user – like texting the delivery person your address (with permission) or making outbound calls to book appointments. The startup said it is working on an iOS version of the app and a paid subscription tier with more features.
Equal AI uses a combination of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models with their own orchestration layer. English is important, but consumers in India often speak in their native language or combine multiple languages in one sentence — something called code mixing. Equal AI claims to have built support for more than 10 languages with this in mind.
Startups have tough competition. Google and Apple both have phone testing products. Truecaller, which has become a household name in India, has been building its own AI assistant features. In the US, a16z-backed privacy startup Closed and introduced phone testing last year. Thiago Viana, global head at Prosus Ventures, said Equal’s understanding of the landscape gives it an edge.
“Equal AI promises to screen calls for you and give you context as to why someone is calling. We think that if an app performs well in a few use cases, it can quickly become popular in its niche and create user attachment to expand to different areas over time,” he told TechCrunch over the phone.
Prosus has been investing in AI assistant startups focused on local markets. Its portfolio includes Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia. Both are caught in the Meta ban on third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, which serves as a platform dependency warning. Equal AI said it doesn’t want to create that kind of dependency — which is why it’s building around calls and its own app rather than piggybacking on the messaging space.
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