Equal AI raised $30M to screen phone calls for Indians who get 20 spam calls a week

Equal AI, an Indian startup that built an AI assistant to answer phone calls on your behalf, has raised $30 million in a Series B led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital. Think Investments and Valiant Fund also participated, alongside individual investors including PhonePe founder Sameer Nigam and Meta’s India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya Devanathan. Total funding now exceeds $42 million.

The problem is simple and enormous. Indian consumers receive a relentless stream of calls from delivery drivers, insurance agents, financial service companies, scammers, and recruiters. “If you are buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls over a week, and that is hard to tackle for a human,” founder Keshav Reddy told TechCrunch.

Equal AI’s Android app screens unknown calls by answering them with an AI agent that asks why the person is calling. It shows the user a summary of the reason on screen, along with quick reply options like “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor.” The AI reads the selected reply back to the caller. Users can also type a custom message. Every call is recorded with a transcription and summary available in the app.

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Since launching last year, the app has grown to more than one million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily actives. The company built support for more than 10 Indian languages, including code-mixing, the common practice of blending multiple languages in a single sentence. English support alone is not enough for the Indian market.

The funding round has an unusual structure. It is split into three tranches, each at a different valuation depending on whether the startup hits predetermined targets. The approach, which is growing but still uncommon, lets a startup advertise its highest valuation even if most of the equity was sold at a lower price. Equal AI declined to share its specific valuations.

The startup was founded in 2022 by Reddy, who comes from the family behind Indian conglomerate GVK, which has holdings in infrastructure, energy, and healthcare. Equal started as a data-sharing company for financial services and still offers KYC verification and financial data analysis alongside the consumer app.

Competition is real. Google and Apple both have call screening products. Truecaller, a household name in India with hundreds of millions of users, is building its own AI assistant features. In the US, a16z-backed Cloaked launched call screening last year. Prosus’s Thiago Viana said Equal’s local context understanding gives it an edge.

Next steps include screening calls from known numbers, making outbound calls on a user’s behalf to book appointments, an iOS version, and a paid subscription tier. Prosus has been investing in AI assistants for local markets, including Spain’s Luzia and Latin America’s Zapia. Both were hit by Meta’s ban on third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, which is why Equal AI built around calls and its own app rather than piggybacking on a messaging platform. The lesson: platform dependency is the risk that kills distribution.