India’s Ringg Bags $10M From Peak XV for Voice AI Push

New Delhi: Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Ringg has raised $10 million from Peak XV Partners, as an extension of its Series A funding round. This adds to the $5.5 million it raised earlier this year, taking the round’s total funding to $15.5 million. Arkam Ventures and Capital 2b also took part in the new round.

Ringg builds AI voice agents for businesses. The company said it already handles 20 million call attempts every month. According to a study by Truecaller, more than 76% of consumers in India still prefer talking to businesses over a phone call. This gives voice AI startups like Ringg a big market to grow into.

Ringg did not start out this way. It began as a text-to-speech company called DesiVocal. But training its own speech models turned out to be too costly, so the founders shifted focus to building voice AI agents for enterprises instead. Fintech company Cred became its first customer. Since then, Ringg has added clients like Flipkart, Practo, Groww, and PolicyBazaar.

Early on, Ringg focused on simple, high-volume tasks like outbound calling, lead qualification, and loan collection calls. But co-founder Siddharth Tripathi said this was not a good long-term plan.

“We quickly realized these are not sticky use cases, and so it’s always going to be a price game,” Tripathi told TechCrunch.

Now, Ringg is moving into more complex jobs. This includes appointment booking for health clinics, recovering abandoned online shopping carts, and KYC (know your customer) checks for fintech apps. Its voice agent is already used across 1,200 clinics for the healthcare app Practo, helping patients book appointments and get follow-up reminders.

Voice calls still make up over 70% of Ringg’s business. But the company is now expanding into chat and WhatsApp as well. For some clients, like Shell, it is also automating browser-based support requests.

“We are trying to position ourselves as a platform for agents that bring outcomes or get things done rather than voice agents for enterprises,” Tripathi said.

Most of Ringg’s customers are in India, though it also has some clients in the Middle East and the US. Rather than selling directly to US companies, the startup wants to team up with Global Capability Centers, offshore support hubs that many multinational companies use in India.

Rishen Kapoor, a principal at Peak XV, said Ringg’s edge comes from building its own AI models early on.

“Because of the technical capabilities, they can actually do these hard-won enterprise workflows end to end,” Kapoor told TechCrunch.

Ringg currently has 40 employees, with more than 15 people hired in the last three months. The startup is now hiring engineers and researchers to help lower the cost of running its AI models.