Equal AI Secures $30 Million to Automate Call Screening Across India

Consumers in India receive countless calls every day, ranging from spam and scam attempts to delivery updates and sales calls from financial services providers. While tools such as Truecaller and the government-backed Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system can help identify callers, knowing a caller’s name often does not explain why they are calling. Equal AI is addressing that problem with an AI assistant designed to answer calls on a user’s behalf, collect information, and explain the purpose of the call.

The Android app has been available since last year and, according to the company, has already grown to more than one million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users. The service screens incoming calls and presents users with a summary of why the caller is trying to reach them.

The app also provides quick-response options such as “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbour.” The AI reads those responses to the caller, while users can also type custom messages for the assistant to deliver. Calls are recorded, and users can access recordings, transcripts, and AI-generated summaries directly within the app.

Equal AI announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital, with additional participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors include PhonePe founder Sameer Nigam, Airtel Family Office’s Zubin Bharti Mittal, Skyflow AI co-founder Anshu Sharma, Meta India and Southeast Asia Vice President Sandhya Devanathan, and CtrlS Datacenters chairman Sridhar Pinnapureddy. With this latest investment, the startup has raised more than $42 million in total funding.

The financing is structured across three tranches, with different valuations tied to the company’s ability to achieve predetermined milestones. This approach, while becoming more common, remains relatively unusual because it allows startups to sell equity at varying valuations within a single funding round. Equal AI declined to disclose the specific valuations attached to each tranche.

The company was founded in 2022 by Keshav Reddy, whose family is associated with the Indian conglomerate GVK, which operates across infrastructure, healthcare, and energy sectors. Equal initially focused on data-sharing services for financial institutions and continues to provide data analytics and know-your-customer (KYC) verification solutions.

“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 realised 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,” Reddy said.

At present, the application only screens calls from unknown numbers. However, the company plans to expand support to calls from known contacts as well. Future versions of the assistant are also expected to perform actions on behalf of users, such as sending delivery instructions with permission or placing outbound calls to schedule appointments. Equal AI is additionally developing an iOS version of the app and plans to introduce a premium subscription offering with enhanced features.

The startup combines speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech-generation technologies through its own orchestration platform. Because many Indian consumers switch between languages or mix multiple languages within a single conversation, Equal AI says it has developed support for more than 10 languages to accommodate those communication patterns.

Competition in the space remains intense. Both Google and Apple offer call-screening capabilities, while Truecaller continues to expand its own AI-powered assistant features. In the United States, the privacy-focused startup Cloaked, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, also introduced a call-screening product last year. According to Prosus Ventures’ global co-head, Thiago Viana, Equal AI’s deep understanding of local user behaviour provides a meaningful advantage.

“Equal AI promises to screen calls for you and provide context on why someone is calling. We think that if an app does well in a few use cases, it can quickly become popular in its niche and create user stickiness to expand in different areas later on,” Reddy said.

Prosus has been actively backing AI assistant startups focused on local markets. Its portfolio includes Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia. Both companies were affected by Meta’s restrictions on third-party AI bots operating via WhatsApp, highlighting the risks of platform dependency. Equal AI says it intentionally avoided that model by building its service around phone calls and a standalone application, rather than relying on an external messaging platform.