Bengaluru-based conversational AI startup Hunar.AI has raised ₹40 crore (about $4.2 million) in a Series A round led by Blume Ventures, in one of the latest signs that investors are backing Indian AI companies building for very Indian problems at scale.

The round also saw participation from Hyderabad Angels Fund, Together Fund, Seedstars International and AVNM Ventures, along with angel investors including PhysicsWallah co-founders Prateek Maheshwari and Alakh Pandey, and MediaMint co-founder Aditya Vuchi.

AI agents for the frontline, not the front office

Founded in 2022 by Shantanu Bhattacharyya and Krishna Khandelwal, Hunar.AI builds conversational AI agents that help enterprises manage the high-volume, repetitive interactions involved in running a frontline workforce: screening candidates, assessing skills, scheduling interviews, onboarding new hires, delivering training and keeping employees engaged.

The founders ran a workforce agency for three years before building the technology, an experience the company says shaped its view that conversations, rather than forms and portals, are the most practical interface for workers spread across warehouses, retail floors, construction sites and service locations.

Built for India’s many languages

Language is central to the pitch. Hunar.AI’s agents support more than 20 languages, including Hindi, English, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati and Tamil, and can switch languages mid-conversation. They are also designed to cope with background noise, varied accents and interruptions, conditions that are routine for blue-collar and grey-collar workers but often trip up conventional voice bots.

According to the company, close to 40% of its voice AI calls now happen in languages other than Hindi and English.

Traction so far

Hunar.AI says daily conversations on its platform have grown 46-fold over the past 12 months, with more than 10 million candidate interactions to date. In September alone, it says, around 200,000 people found jobs through conversations with its AI agents.

The company claims its platform has cut the time taken to run hiring, onboarding and engagement processes by up to 90%, shortened recruitment cycles by as much as 75% and doubled conversion rates for clients.

Where the money goes

The fresh capital will go towards strengthening Hunar.AI’s AI infrastructure, building more of its technology in-house, developing new products and expanding across frontline-heavy sectors. International markets are also on the roadmap.

Why it matters

The deal lands at a time when overall startup funding in India has cooled, yet AI continues to attract the largest share of capital. For enterprise leaders, Hunar.AI’s model is a reminder that some of the most immediate returns from agentic and voice AI may come not from knowledge-worker copilots, but from automating the sheer volume of conversations needed to hire and retain India’s vast frontline workforce, in the languages those workers actually speak.

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