Indian voice AI startup Ringg secures $10m investment to expand beyond phone calls

A voice AI startup based in India, Ringg, has raised $10 million in funding from Peak XV Partners, bringing its total Series A round to $15.5 million. The investment comes as the company aims to expand its capabilities beyond traditional phone call automation. According to a recent study by Truecaller, over 76% of Indian consumers prefer interacting with businesses through voice rather than phone calls, highlighting a significant opportunity for voice AI in customer support and outreach. Ringg, which processes over 20 million call attempts monthly, is leveraging this trend to scale its operations. Ringg initially started as a text-to-speech company called DesiVocal but shifted focus to building voice AI agents for enterprises after realizing the high cost of training speech models. The company’s first customer was the Indian fintech firm Cred, followed by other notable clients such as Flipkart, Practo, Groww, and PolicyBazaar. Siddharth Tripathi, co-founder of Ringg, noted that early use cases like outbound calling and loan collection were low-complexity and not sticky, leading the company to focus on more complex workflows such as healthcare appointment booking, e-commerce abandoned-cart recovery, and fintech onboarding. Tripathi explained that Ringg’s voice agent now supports over 1,200 clinics through the healthcare app Practo, helping patients book appointments and follow up on post-visit steps. While voice calls still account for over 70% of Ringg’s business, the company is expanding into other channels such as chat and WhatsApp, and even browser-based support for clients like Shell. Tripathi emphasized that Ringg is positioning itself as a platform that delivers outcomes rather than just providing voice agents. Most of Ringg’s customers are based in India, with a few in the Middle East and the U.S. However, the company does not aim to sell directly to U.S. firms but instead seeks partnerships with Global Capability Centers in India, which serve as offshore hubs for multinational companies. Ringg builds its own speech recognition and generation models and aims to own the full voice stack, including infrastructure and deployment, though this remains costly. For now, the product functions as an orchestration layer, routing tasks to different models based on use cases. Rishen Kapoor, a principal at Peak XV, highlighted that Ringg’s technical depth, stemming from its origins as a research lab, enables it to handle complex enterprise workflows. He noted that Ringg can complete higher-value tasks such as merchant onboarding and L1 and L2 support with quality and consistency. Voice AI in India is a competitive market, with numerous players including Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Cartesia, and local firms like Sarvam and Smallest.ai. Orchestration-focused startups like Bolna and Blue Machines are also competing in the same space, while others like Gnani and Arrowhead focus heavily on finance. Ringg currently employs 40 people, with more than 15 hired in the last three months. The company is actively recruiting for forward-deployed engineer roles that combine technical and product management skills, as well as researchers focused on reducing the cost of running its models.