A recent study by Truecaller reveals that over 76% of consumers in India still prefer speaking with businesses over the phone. With voice remaining the top communication choice for customers, there’s a significant opportunity to automate support and outreach through voice AI in the region. Ringg, a voice AI startup already handling 20 million call attempts monthly, is confident this volume will keep rising—and it’s secured fresh funding to back that bet.

The company announced today that it has raised $10 million from Peak XV Partners as an extension of its Series A. Earlier this year, Ringg had already secured $5.5 million in a Series A round, bringing the total for this round to $15.5 million.

Ringg originally launched as DesiVocal, a text-to-speech startup. But building its own speech models turned out to be costly, prompting the founders to pivot up the stack—creating voice AI agents tailored for enterprise needs. Indian fintech Cred became its first client, and since then, Ringg has onboarded other Indian startups like Flipkart, Practo, Groww, and PolicyBazaar.

In the beginning, the focus was on high-volume, low-complexity tasks such as outbound calling, lead qualification, and loan collection. While Ringg still handles those simpler use cases, it’s now targeting more intricate workflows: booking appointments for healthcare clinics, recovering abandoned carts for e-commerce sites, and conducting onboarding and KYC checks for fintech applications. Tripathi noted that Ringg’s voice agent now operates across 1,200 clinics for the healthcare app Practo, assisting patients with booking visits or following up after appointments.

Voice calls still account for over 70% of Ringg’s business, but the startup is expanding into other channels like chat and WhatsApp. For clients such as Shell, it’s also automating browser-based support requests. “We’re aiming to position ourselves as a platform for agents that deliver outcomes or get things done, rather than just voice agents for enterprises,” Tripathi explained.

Most of Ringg’s customers are based in India, with a few in the Middle East and the U.S. However, the startup isn’t targeting American companies directly. Instead, it plans to partner with Global Capability Centers in India—offshore hubs that multinationals increasingly rely on for back-office and support functions—to offer automation alongside human support.

Tripathi mentioned that Ringg builds its own speech recognition and generation models and eventually hopes to own the entire voice stack, including infrastructure and deployment. For now, though, that remains too expensive, so the product functions as an orchestration layer, routing tasks to different models depending on the use case.

Rishen Kapoor, a principal at Peak XV, noted that since Ringg started as a research lab developing its own models, that technical depth is evident in the complex use cases it’s now tackling. “Because of their technical capabilities, they can handle these demanding enterprise workflows end to end,” he said.

Voice AI in India is a crowded space. Model developers like Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Cartesia, and local players such as Sarvam and Smallest.ai are all competing for leadership. Orchestration-focused startups like Bolna and Blue Machines are targeting the same layer as Ringg, while sector-specific players like Gnani and Arrowhead concentrate heavily on finance.

This layered ecosystem—model makers, orchestrators, and application-layer players all vying to secure enterprise workflows—tells the bigger story. The money and long-term defensibility increasingly lie with whoever owns the customer relationship and the final outcome.

Ringg currently employs 40 people, with over 15 hired in the last three months. The startup is actively recruiting forward-deployed engineers who blend technical expertise with product management skills, as well as researchers focused on reducing the cost of running its models.