Arrowhead raises $3 mn to expand human-like voice AI for financial sales

The startup's human-like voice AI can handle long sales calls and, according to the company, delivers significantly higher conversion rates than human agents

Arrowhead, a voice AI startup developing human-sounding sales agents for financial services, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with backing from prominent fintech founders and executives. Several of the angel investors—including leaders from CRED, M2P, Turtlemint and Kissht—are also customers of the platform. The company plans to use the funds to deepen its AI models, expand its technology and go-to-market teams, and boost sales conversions for financial institutions. 

The angel investors who participated in the round include Kunal Shah, founder, CRED; Madhusudanan R, founder, M2P; and senior fintech executives Keyur Rajiv Kashikar, Turtlemint; Pramod Mohandas, Kissht; and Shadab Shamim, Kissht. 

“Indian enterprises have long relied on large human sales teams because labour was considered inexpensive, but this has led to significant inefficiencies, from training and attrition to mis-selling and inconsistent outcomes,” said Devyani Gupta, co-founder and chief executive officer, Arrowhead. “We’re building voice AI agents that can handle long, complex sales conversations while delivering meaningfully better conversion outcomes. What’s exciting is how quickly financial institutions are now moving from pilots to full-scale adoption.” 

Arrowhead was founded by Devyani Gupta, a Wharton alumnus and former BCG consultant, and Vengadanathan Srinivasan, a software engineer with over a decade of experience across leading technology companies including AWS, Rippling, Uber and Airbnb. The company enables banks, NBFCs and fintechs in India and globally to replicate their top-performer sales agent behaviour at scale through ultra-human voice AI bots that deliver the highest-converting conversations. 

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 the transition still is. “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,” said Dharnidharka. “Arrowhead’s focus on delivering superior conversion outcomes, combined with its strong traction among leading financial institutions, positions it well to capture this opportunity as the market scales.”

 

At the core of Arrowhead’s platform is a home-grown orchestration layer that enables voice AI bots to conduct conversations lasting up to 20 minutes without customers realising they are speaking to a bot. The platform is designed to deliver natural, compliant conversations and consistently strong responses at scale. From August to October alone last year, Arrowhead grew its ARR five times, reflecting rapid enterprise adoption. To date, every proof of concept Arrowhead has participated in has converted into a go-live deployment, with the company yet to lose a single POC (proof of concept).

 

Arrowhead currently operates across India and Southeast Asia, serving over 50 customers across a range of BFSI use cases. The company works with leading institutions including Bank of Baroda Cards, Aditya Birla Capital, Paytm, Tata 1MG, upGrad, Kissht, Equentis, TurtleMint, InsuranceDekho and Mudra Fincorp.

 

“Arrowhead completely surpassed anything we could have expected. We achieved up to 45 per cent higher conversion rates and were able to reach as much as 15 times the volume of customers than previously. They were the only voice AI company I fully trusted to execute my vision,” said Shrey Agarwal, vice-president, Paytm.

 

For one of India’s largest financial institutions, Arrowhead’s voice AI bots now conduct full-length health insurance sales calls, delivering 45 per cent higher conversion rates than human agents and fully replacing manual calling operations. In another deployment, Arrowhead enabled a financial services company to reach 100 per cent of its customer base for insurance renewals, resulting in a 20 per cent increase in renewal rates, where human agents previously lacked capacity.

 

Over the next 12–18 months, Arrowhead plans to deepen its BFSI-specific conversation models. It would invest in infrastructure supporting tens of thousands of concurrent calls with sub-500 ms latency. It would also develop emotion-aware voice agents as it expands into a unified omnichannel customer interaction platform across chat, calls and messaging.