Bolna AI

What do they actually do

Bolna AI provides a hosted platform for building, testing, and running phone-call agents that work across Indian languages. It lets teams create agents via a no‑code playground or API, plug into existing telephony, and route each call through different ASR/LLM/TTS providers to balance accuracy, latency, and cost. Agents can trigger external APIs, hand off to humans when needed, and return structured outputs and analytics (homepage, docs, open‑source orchestration).

The company positions itself as an orchestration and hosting layer rather than a single voice model vendor. It reports hundreds of companies using the platform, more than 500K minutes of calls per month, and case studies with thousands of conversations for customers like Awign and Hyreo (homepage, YC profile, Awign story, Hyreo story). Enterprise features include integrations (Zapier/n8n/Make), sub‑accounts, and on‑prem/data‑residency options (docs: integrations, changelog).

Who are their target customer(s)

• Recruitment platforms and staffing agencies: They need to screen and contact thousands of candidates quickly across many languages, keep costs predictable, and escalate ambiguous cases to human recruiters without losing context (Awign, Hyreo).
• E‑commerce and logistics teams: They must drive successful delivery, payment reminders, and recovery calls at scale; missed contacts and language gaps lead to refunds and lost revenue (homepage).
• Banks, lenders, and BFSI operations: They run verification, collections, and KYC calls that require high accuracy on names/numbers and strict data controls, while cutting the cost of repetitive calling (homepage, YC profile).
• Customer support/operations at mid‑large enterprises (incl. edtech): They want 24×7 phone help in many languages without scaling headcount and need easy hooks into existing ticketing and workflow tools (Hyreo, docs: integrations).
• IT/platform/compliance owners at enterprises: They need to reduce vendor sprawl, route across voice vendors for cost/quality control, and meet data residency or on‑prem requirements for regulated workloads (orchestration repo, on‑prem changelog).

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Run hands‑on, short paid pilots with warm leads; customize templates (recruiting, logistics, collections) and integrate with existing systems to prove clear time/cost savings (Awign, Hyreo, YC profile).
• First 50: Productize best‑performing templates and pursue targeted outbound plus co‑sell with ATS/e‑commerce platforms and CPaaS partners; use simple integrations so prospects can place live calls within a day (docs: integrations, features).
• First 100: Scale vertical SDRs and solutions engineering for parallel pilots; expand reseller/telco partnerships; remove procurement blockers with on‑prem/data‑residency, sub‑accounts, and compliance materials (on‑prem & enterprise changelog, docs changelog).

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

In India, the combined software/solutions spend across conversational AI, IVR, and contact‑center AI is roughly $1B in 2024 and growing ~25–27% annually, pointing to multi‑billion potential by decade’s end (IMARC, Grand View, MRFR).

Bottom-up calculation:

Because these categories overlap, a conservative, deduplicated 2024 India TAM for voice automation/orchestration is ~$0.8–1.2B; capturing 0.1–1% implies roughly $1–10M ARR potential domestically before international expansion (IMARC, MRFR, Grand View).

Assumptions:

• Figures deduplicate overlapping conversational‑AI, IVR, and CCaaS spend to avoid double counting.
• Focus is enterprise software/solutions budgets in India, not consumer telecom or pure connectivity.
• Initial SAM centers on BFSI, e‑commerce/logistics, recruitment, and edtech where phone‑first automation is adopted.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Skit.ai: India‑focused voice AI platform for contact center automation; competes on end‑to‑end voicebot deployments across BFSI and other verticals.
• Exotel: Indian CPaaS and cloud contact‑center provider with IVR and automation; overlaps where buyers want telephony + voice workflows in one stack.
• Yellow.ai: Conversational AI platform offering voice and chat bots for enterprises; competes on multi‑channel automation and contact‑center use cases.
• Uniphore: Enterprise conversational AI company (India‑origin) focused on voice automation, agent assist, and analytics for large contact centers.
• PolyAI: Global provider of voice assistants for customer service; overlaps on natural‑sounding phone agents for support and operations.