Synopsis
Cloud telephony firm Exotel has acqui-hired the core team of voice AI startup Dubverse, including cofounders Anuja Dhawan and Varshul Gupta, as it looks to deepen its capabilities in conversational intelligence and enterprise customer experience solutions.As part of the move, Dhawan will lead Exotel’s Conversation Quality Analytics (CQA) solution, while Gupta will head AI, Exotel's founder Shivakumar Ganesan told ET. Dubverse, an AI-powered video dubbing platform, is primarily backed by Kalaari Capital, which led their $800,000 funding round in June 2022. Dubverse will continue to operate as a standalone platform.
Exotel, backed by A91 Partners, Blume Ventures, and CX Partners, serves over 7,000 enterprises including Apollo 24/7, Shiprocket, HDFC Securities, Truecaller, and MG Motor. It handles more than 20 billion interactions annually across sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and ecommerce.
This acqui-hire comes as the company pivots to being an AI-first customer engagement platform, with increased investment in voice AI, automation, and conversation intelligence. In total, the company has made five-six key senior hires from Dubeverse.
"Customers started asking us to derive insights from call recordings, train models on their own data, and improve performance for their use cases. We needed a team that had experience with GPUs, training, and fine-tuning models. That’s the context in which we brought in the Dubverse team," Ganesan said.
Founded in 2021, Dubverse built multilingual voice AI systems, including text-to-speech and speech synthesis technologies, and has served over 3 million users across more than 70 languages, the company said.
With Exotel mostly operating in the business-to-customer (B2C) space, Ganesan said that around 60% of customer experience work can be replaced by AI. He added that while the total number of human agents is expected to reduce by about 60%, the remaining will move from on-premise to the cloud.
"Exotel is one of the few Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) players offering the full stack — software, network, and infrastructure. So we are actually seeing growth in contact centre seats as well, even as automation increases," Ganesan explained.
The company reported operating revenues of Rs 490.5 crore in FY25 compared to Rs 444 crore in the year prior.
Around 80% of Exotel’s business comes from India. However, growth rates are higher in international markets, particularly the Middle East and Africa.
"The situation in the Middle East is expected to impact about 10% of our growth plans. One large deal has already been delayed, with customers preferring to hold off on new decisions for now," Ganesan said.
The company is also exploring newer markets such as Japan, Latin America, and Australia. In previous years, Exotel has made acquisitions such as Ameyo (2021), Cogno AI (2021), and Croak.it (2015).
