via TechCrunch
Equal AI Raises $30M to Screen Calls So Indians Don’t Have To
In India, consumers receive a flood of calls daily—from spam and scams to delivery personnel and financial service companies. While apps like Truecaller and the government’s Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system help identify callers, knowing a name often isn’t enough. That’s where Equal AI steps in: it offers an assistant that receives calls on your behalf, gathers information, and tells you why someone is calling.
Available on Android since its launch last year, the app has grown to over a million monthly active users and more than 300,000 daily active users. When a call comes in, Equal AI screens it and displays the reason for the call. The dialer shows quick reply options like “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor,” and the AI reads these responses aloud to the caller. Users can also type custom messages for the AI to voice. The app records all calls, and users can access recordings, transcripts, and summaries within the app.
On June 2, 2026, Equal AI announced it has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital, with participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors include Indian fintech PhonePe founder Sameer Nigam, Zubin Bharti Mittal from the Airtel Family Office, Skyflow AI co-founder Anshu Sharma, Meta India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya Devanathan, and CtrlS Datacenters Chairman Sridhar Pinnapureddy. With this latest injection, the company has raised over $42 million to date.
Notably, the Series B round is structured in three tranches, with the startup carrying a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it hits predetermined targets. This approach—while still uncommon—allows startups to sell equity at different prices within the same round. It also has an unusual quirk: the startup can advertise the highest valuation achieved, even if the bulk of the equity was sold at a lower one. Equal AI declined to disclose its specific valuations.
Founded in 2022 by Keshav Reddy—whose family runs Indian conglomerate GVK, with holdings in infrastructure, energy, and healthcare—Equal started as a data-sharing company for financial services. It still offers data for financial analysis and know-your-customer (KYC) verification services for employers. “We always wanted to be a customer-facing company,” Reddy explained. “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.”
Currently, the app screens only unknown calls, but the company plans to extend this to known numbers as well. Equal AI also aims to enable its AI assistant to take proactive actions on users’ behalf—like texting a delivery person your address (with consent) or making outbound calls to book appointments. The startup is working on an iOS version and a paid subscription tier with additional features. Behind the scenes, Equal AI uses a mix of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models, layered with its own orchestration system.