Equal AI, an Indian startup that uses artificial intelligence to screen incoming calls on behalf of users, announced in June 2026 that it has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to over $42 million.
The round was led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital, with participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors include PhonePe founder Sameer Nigam, Zubin Bharti Mittal from Airtel Family Office, Skyflow AI co-founder Anshu Sharma, Meta’s VP for India and Southeast Asia Sandhya Devanathan, and CtrlS Datacenters Chairman Sridhar Pinnapureddy. The round is structured in three tranches, with the startup carrying a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it hits predetermined targets. Equal AI declined to disclose its specific valuations.
The company’s Android app answers incoming calls, gathers information from the caller, and displays the reason for the call to the user. It offers quick reply options — such as “Leave the delivery near the door” — which the AI reads back to the caller. Users can also type custom responses. All calls are recorded, with transcriptions and summaries stored in the app. Since launching last year, the app has reached more than one million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users.
Equal AI was founded in 2022 by Keshav Reddy, whose family is behind Indian conglomerate GVK. The company originally focused on data-sharing for financial services and still offers data for financial analysis and KYC verification. “If you are buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls over a week, and that is hard to tackle for a human,” Reddy told TechCrunch.
The app currently screens unknown calls only, but the company plans to extend screening to known numbers, add outbound calling capabilities, launch an iOS version, and introduce a paid subscription tier. Equal AI says it supports over 10 languages, including handling code-mixing — the blending of multiple languages within a single conversation — common among Indian users.
The startup competes with Google, Apple, and Truecaller, which has been building its own AI assistant features. Equal AI says it deliberately built around its own app and phone calls rather than a third-party messaging platform, citing platform dependency as a risk.
Source: TechCrunch