India's Ringg Raises $10 Million to Expand Voice AI

Voice remains the preferred means of communication between consumers and businesses in India, with a recent study by Truecaller indicating that more than 76% of consumers there prefer to speak with companies via phone calls. This reality opens a broad opportunity for businesses to automate support and communication calls using voice AI—the bet on which the startup Ringg has built its business model.

A New Funding Round Boosts Ambitions

Ringg announced it has secured $10 million in funding from Peak XV Partners, as part of an extension to its Series A round. The company had previously raised $5.5 million earlier this year, bringing the total round to $15.5 million. The company currently handles around 20 million call attempts per month and is betting on this number continuing to grow in the coming months.

From Text-to-Speech to Intelligent Agents

Ringg began its journey under the name "DesiVocal" as a company specializing in text-to-speech conversion, but the cost of training proprietary voice models was high, so the founders decided to move up the value chain by building enterprise-oriented voice AI agents. Fintech company "Cred" was its first customer, later joined by prominent names such as Flipkart, Practo, Groww, and PolicyBazaar.

Siddharth Tripathi, co-founder, explains that the company initially focused on simple, high-volume tasks such as outbound calls, lead qualification, and loan collection, but discovered that these use cases did not generate real loyalty and quickly turned into competition based solely on price.

Moving Toward More Complex Tasks

Ringg still serves some simple use cases, but it has focused its efforts on more complex workflows, including:

• Booking appointments for healthcare clinics.
• Recovering abandoned shopping carts for e-commerce sites.
• Onboarding and Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures for fintech applications.

According to Tripathi, the company's voice agent today operates across 1,200 clinics affiliated with the healthcare app "Practo," where it helps patients book visits and follow up on subsequent steps after examinations.

Expanding Beyond Phone Calls

Although voice calls still represent more than 70% of the company's business, it has begun expanding into other channels including text conversations and WhatsApp. It also works with clients such as "Shell" to automate support requests via browser. Tripathi notes that the company aims to present itself as a platform for agents that accomplish tasks and achieve results, not just voice agents for enterprises.

Global Expansion Strategy

Most of Ringg's customers are concentrated in India, with a limited number in the Middle East and the United States. However, the company does not seek to sell directly to American companies, but rather prefers to partner with Global Capability Centers in India—the offshore centers that multinational companies rely on for support and back-office services—to sell automation capabilities alongside human support.

The company builds its own models for speech recognition and generation, and aspires in the future to own the entire voice chain, including infrastructure and deployment. However, given the high cost at present, the product operates as an orchestration layer that routes tasks to different models depending on the use case.

A Market Crowded with Competitors

India's voice AI sector is witnessing intense competition, as model-building companies such as Deepgram, ElevenLabs, and Cartesia compete alongside local players such as Sarvam and Smallest.ai. Orchestration-focused startups such as Bolna and Blue Machines are also pursuing the same layer in which Ringg operates, while sector-specific players such as Gnani and Arrowhead focus on the financial domain.

Rishen Kapoor, a Peak XV official, believes that Ringg's research roots and its ability to build its own models are reflected in its capacity to complete complex enterprise workflows end-to-end with quality and consistency, such as merchant onboarding and advanced support tiers. The company currently has 40 employees, having hired more than 15 of them over the past three months, and is looking to hire field engineers and researchers focused on reducing the operating cost of models.

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