Equal AI raises $30M to automate call screening

Equal AI, an India-based startup founded in 2022 by Keshav Reddy, has raised $30 million in Series B funding—a stage of venture capital financing. The round was led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital, with participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors in the round included Sameer Nigam, Zubin Bharti Mittal, Anshu Sharma, Sandhya Devanathan, and Sridhar Pinnapureddy. This latest injection brings the company’s total funding to date to over $42 million. The Series B round features an unusual structure: it is divided into three tranches, with the startup carrying a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it hits predetermined targets. This structure allows a startup to advertise the highest valuation achieved, even if the bulk of the equity was sold at a lower price. Equal AI declined to provide its specific valuations.

The startup’s Android app, which launched last year, has grown to more than a million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users. The app screens unknown calls, displays the reason for the call, and provides quick reply options that an AI reads back to the caller. “We always wanted to be a customer-facing company, and with Equal AI, the first use case we launched was a call assistant because we realized users get a ton of calls for financial services or job openings. If you are buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls over a week, and that is hard to tackle for a human,” founder Keshav Reddy said. Equal AI is planning to introduce the ability to screen calls from known numbers. The startup is also working on an iOS version of the app, a paid subscription tier, and features that allow the assistant to take proactive actions on a user’s behalf.

To handle these interactions, Equal AI uses a mix of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models, managed by its own orchestration layer, which is a software layer managing the interaction between different AI models. Because consumers in India frequently engage in code-mixing—the phenomenon of blending multiple languages in a single sentence—the startup has built support for over 10 languages. Equal AI faces competition from tech giants Google and Apple, which both offer call-screening products, as well as specialized players like Truecaller and U.S.-based Cloaked. To avoid platform dependency, Equal AI built its service around phone calls and its own app rather than piggybacking on messaging platforms. This contrasts with other AI assistant startups in Prosus Ventures’ portfolio, such as Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia, which faced disruptions after Meta banned third-party AI bots on WhatsApp.

Why it matters

Equal AI is addressing the high volume of spam and service calls in India by providing an AI assistant that screens calls and provides context, aiming to build user stickiness before expanding into broader AI-driven tasks.