Voice AI startup Arrowhead eyes fresh funding

Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Arrowhead is gearing up for a Series A funding round to broaden its international reach, according to cofounder and CEO Devyani Gupta. Gupta informed ET AI that the company intends to leverage the funds to aggressively penetrate additional markets worldwide following the next funding round. She did not disclose the exact amount the startup plans to raise or the timeline for the fundraising process.

The proposed funding follows Arrowhead's $3 million seed round, led by venture capital firm Stellaris Venture Partners. Other participants included CRED founder Kunal Shah, M2P Fintech cofounder Madhusudanan R, and senior executives from fintech companies such as Turtlemint and Kissht. The company raised an earlier pre-seed funding of around $320,000.

Arrowhead, founded in 2022 by Gupta and Vengadanathan Srinivasan, primarily operates from India but has entities in the US. The company offers conversational agents for banks, non-banking financial companies, and fintech firms across sectors such as lending, insurance, and securities. Arrowhead's customers include Axis Bank, RBL Bank, IndusInd Bank, Bank of Baroda, Aditya Birla Capital, and L&T Finance.

The startup's conversational agents handle various use cases, including loan sales and collections, health, life, and motor insurance sales and renewals, as well as the sale of financial products like mutual funds and fixed deposits. Gupta revealed that Arrowhead's agents have achieved conversion rates up to 35% higher than human agents while operating at scale. On a daily basis, the company processes between 7 lakh and 20 lakh calls, with some individual use cases involving 10 lakh to 20 lakh leads per month.

Arrowhead's voice agents are built from scratch using an in-house orchestrator, speech-to-text model, small language model, and text-to-speech model. The company uses open-source models, including Alibaba's Qwen and Google's Gemma, and fine-tunes them for specific use cases while hosting them on its infrastructure in India. Gupta stated that the company employs guardrails to ensure the agents comply with regulated financial-services workflows, including a "circuit breaker" that detects hallucinations during calls and alerts engineers before restarting the system.