News · AI & Deep Tech

Voice AI panel targets next 500 million users

By Startup Enthusiast · 18 June 2026

What they do

Bolna chains multilingual models for human-like voice interactions

Panel at Inc42 AI Summit 2026 discussed reaching non-English-speaking internet users

Legacy telecom infrastructure is not built for AI, requiring new telco layers

A panel at the Inc42 AI Summit 2026 discussed how companies are using voice AI to reach the next 500 million users.
The Indian voice AI market is projected to reach $1.8 billion by 2030.
Enterprises are shifting from text-heavy apps to conversational voice interfaces.
The next 500 million non-English-speaking internet users in India are the target audience.
The panel was moderated by Nikhil Subramaniam, senior editor at Inc42.
Maitreya Wagh is the founder of Bolna, an orchestration platform for voice AI.
Suman Gandham is cofounder and CEO of Vobiz.ai, a voice AI company.
Nitin Pulyani is SVP and head of product at Cashfree Payments, exploring voice agents for merchant onboarding and fraud verification.

Legacy telecom infrastructure has high latency, 8 kHz sampling rate, no automated noise cancellation, and rigid call controls.
Suman Gandham noted that the telco layer was built for human-to-human calls, not AI.
An AI-first telco infrastructure is needed for low latency and noise suppression.
Infrastructure readiness is critical for scaling voice AI in regulated sectors like fintech.

Bolna is an orchestration platform that chains multilingual models for human-like voice.
Vobiz.ai is a voice AI company whose call volume grew from 1 lakh to 10 lakh daily calls.
Cashfree Payments is a fintech company exploring voice agents for merchant onboarding and fraud verification calls.

Product: Self-serve voice AI orchestration platform that enables enterprises to design, deploy, and manage conversational agents for telephony.
Customers: Enterprises needing automated telephonic workflows across sales, support, collections, and recruitment.
How it makes money: SaaS subscription and consumption-based pricing per minute or call volume.
What sets it apart: Proprietary voice AI architecture supporting over 10 Indian languages optimized for regional accents and noisy telephony environments.