Arrowhead, a voice AI startup that builds sales agents for financial services, has raised $3 million in a funding round led by the early-stage venture capital firm Stellaris Venture Partners.
The round also saw participation from angel investors such as Cred founder Kunal Shah and M2P founder Madhusudanan R, along with other senior fintech executives.
The company plans to deploy the capital to enhance its core AI models, scale its technology and go-to-market teams, and improve sales conversion rates for financial services firms.
“Our bot has been able to achieve up to 45% higher conversion than human agents, and we've seen companies replace their human teams entirely with our bots,” cofounder and chief executive Devyani Gupta told ET.
Founded in 2023 by Gupta and Vengadanathan Srinivasan, the Bengaluru-based company enables banks, NBFCs, and fintechs in India and abroad to replicate the behaviour of their top-performing sales agents at scale using voice AI bots.
According to the company, its AI calling agents handle high-volume tasks such as loan sales, collections, renewals, and insurance sales, allowing enterprises to scale outreach while improving connection and conversion rates through positive conversations.
“We believe that through verticalisation, you can create a much stronger and higher converting bot because you're much more focussed from a product perspective,” said Gupta, noting that the company will primarily focus on financial services.
Arrowhead operates in India and southeast Asia, and has over 50 customers across multiple BFSI use cases, including Bank of Baroda Cards, Aditya Birla Capital, Paytm, Kissht, Equentis, TurtleMint, InsuranceDekho, and Mudra Fincorp. It also has other clients outside the BFSI space, like Tata 1mg and Upgrad.
“We're focussed on India because we've been very impressed by the speed at which India is moving to adopt this technology. But by this year itself, we are expanding much more into global markets as well. This would include the Middle East and other parts of Asia,” she added.
Over the next 12-18 months, the startup plans to further develop BFSI-focussed conversation models, build infrastructure to support large volumes of simultaneous calls with low latency, and work on emotion-aware voice agents as it expands into an omnichannel customer interaction platform spanning calls, chat, and messaging.
Commenting on the investment, Vardhan Dharnidharka, principal at Stellaris Venture Partners said, “Voice AI for the financial sector in India alone represents a $3 billion market, with less than $50 million penetrated so far, highlighting how early we still are in this transition. What’s particularly striking is the speed at which banks and financial institutions are now adopting voice AI, driven by top-down, organisation-wide AI mandates.”
The round also saw participation from angel investors such as Cred founder Kunal Shah and M2P founder Madhusudanan R, along with other senior fintech executives.
The company plans to deploy the capital to enhance its core AI models, scale its technology and go-to-market teams, and improve sales conversion rates for financial services firms.
“Our bot has been able to achieve up to 45% higher conversion than human agents, and we've seen companies replace their human teams entirely with our bots,” cofounder and chief executive Devyani Gupta told ET.
Founded in 2023 by Gupta and Vengadanathan Srinivasan, the Bengaluru-based company enables banks, NBFCs, and fintechs in India and abroad to replicate the behaviour of their top-performing sales agents at scale using voice AI bots.
According to the company, its AI calling agents handle high-volume tasks such as loan sales, collections, renewals, and insurance sales, allowing enterprises to scale outreach while improving connection and conversion rates through positive conversations.
“We believe that through verticalisation, you can create a much stronger and higher converting bot because you're much more focussed from a product perspective,” said Gupta, noting that the company will primarily focus on financial services.
Arrowhead operates in India and southeast Asia, and has over 50 customers across multiple BFSI use cases, including Bank of Baroda Cards, Aditya Birla Capital, Paytm, Kissht, Equentis, TurtleMint, InsuranceDekho, and Mudra Fincorp. It also has other clients outside the BFSI space, like Tata 1mg and Upgrad.
“We're focussed on India because we've been very impressed by the speed at which India is moving to adopt this technology. But by this year itself, we are expanding much more into global markets as well. This would include the Middle East and other parts of Asia,” she added.
Over the next 12-18 months, the startup plans to further develop BFSI-focussed conversation models, build infrastructure to support large volumes of simultaneous calls with low latency, and work on emotion-aware voice agents as it expands into an omnichannel customer interaction platform spanning calls, chat, and messaging.
Commenting on the investment, Vardhan Dharnidharka, principal at Stellaris Venture Partners said, “Voice AI for the financial sector in India alone represents a $3 billion market, with less than $50 million penetrated so far, highlighting how early we still are in this transition. What’s particularly striking is the speed at which banks and financial institutions are now adopting voice AI, driven by top-down, organisation-wide AI mandates.”