Equal AI: Revolutionizing Call Screening in India
In India, consumers receive a plethora of calls every day, ranging from spam and scams to delivery notifications and financial service companies reaching out. While apps like Truecaller and the government’s Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system attempt to identify callers, merely knowing a caller’s name often falls short. Recognizing this gap, Equal AI is stepping in to create an intelligent assistant designed to take calls on behalf of users, gather pertinent information, and convey the purpose of each call.
Impressive Growth and Functionality
The Equal AI app is currently available on Android and has seen substantial growth since its launch last year. It boasts over one million monthly active users and more than 300,000 daily active users. The app effectively screens calls and provides context for why someone is calling.
Users benefit from quick reply options such as “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor,” which the AI reads back to the caller. Additionally, users can type custom messages for the AI to articulate. The app records calls, enabling users to access recordings and transcription histories with comprehensive summaries.
Image Credits:Equal AI
Significant Funding and Strategic Growth
Equal AI recently announced it has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital, with additional support from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Notable individual investors include Sameer Nigam, founder of Indian fintech PhonePe, Zubin Bharti Mittal from Airtel Family Office, Anshu Sharma, co-founder of Skyflow AI, Sandhya Devanathan, VP of Meta India and Southeast Asia, and Sridhar Pinnapureddy, chairman of CtrlS Datacenters. This funding raises the company’s total to over $42 million to date.
The funding round is uniquely structured in three tranches, with valuations varying at each stage based on achieving predetermined targets. This approach allows Equal AI to advertise the highest valuation achieved, despite selling most equity at a lower valuation. The company chose to withhold specific valuation details.
Origins and Vision
Founded by Keshav Reddy in 2022, Equal AI emerged from the family behind the Indian conglomerate GVK, which has a diverse portfolio in infrastructure, energy, and healthcare. Initially a data-sharing entity for financial services, Equal AI still provides data for financial analysis and KYC verification services for employers.
“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 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,” Reddy explained to TechCrunch about the company’s inception.
Future Plans and Technological Edge
Currently, the app screens only unknown calls, but Equal AI plans to expand its capabilities to include known numbers. Future enhancements will enable the AI assistant to take proactive actions, such as texting a delivery person or making outbound calls to book appointments. An iOS version and a paid subscription tier with additional features are also in the works.
Equal AI utilizes a combination of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models, supported by its own orchestration layer. Recognizing the linguistic diversity in India, the app supports over 10 languages, accommodating code-mixing where multiple languages are blended in conversation.
Competitive Landscape and Market Position
Equal AI faces competition from giants like Google and Apple, which offer call-screening products. Truecaller, a well-established name in India, is enhancing its AI assistant features. In the U.S., privacy startup Cloaked, backed by a16z, launched call screening last year. However, Thiago Viana, global co-head at Prosus Ventures, believes Equal AI’s understanding of local context provides a competitive 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 told TechCrunch by phone.
Strategic Independence
Prosus has been investing in AI assistant startups with a focus on local markets. Its portfolio includes Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia, both affected by Meta’s ban on third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, highlighting the risks of platform dependency. Equal AI has strategically avoided such dependency by focusing on calls and developing its own app, steering clear of relying on external messaging platforms.
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