bolna

The year that went by, bringing many firsts and skyrocketing highs for this rocketship... 2025 was incredibly thrilling for us at @bolna_dev. Here we go with the flashback... 🧵

At Bolna, we make something people want. Turns out you can't do that without making people feel wanted first. The people who built the modern workplace and the force behind the Labour Day understood this before most founders did. At its core, Labour Day has always been about recognising the dignity of the people doing the hard work. The ones who showed up before it was safe, before it was celebrated or before anyone was watching. And along the way, made it better for everyone who came after. We think about that a lot when we hire. When we build. When we decide what kind of company we want to be. The people in this video ship code, close deals, train models, write prompts, break things on purpose, make AI empathize and sound like human while making people feel heard. But apparently, cannot be left alone at an offsite without a referee! And we wouldn't have it any other way. If this looks like your kind of chaos, come help us build. Happy Labour Day to all those who continue to be the force.

6 months back @bolna_dev was doing ~5B tokens/month. Today, that's grown to over 65B. Here's to the next order of magnitude.

Building voice AI in-house feels like a smart cost-cutting move. Nine months later, your engineers are running regression tests every time a new model drops. Except, owning infrastructure debt dressed up as a product roadmap was never in their JDs. The companies pulling ahead didn't out-build their competitors. They figured out escalation design, CRM integration, and what success actually looks like in their industry. That's where the work is. The stack was never the edge. If you're figuring out where to draw that line, this one's for you. 👇

The voice AI market has never been more crowded... and confusing. 20+ models in the last 12 months. One is super cheap, one is super quick, and one is great at navigating noisy environments. And one is the best at everything, but only in English For you, this means navigating different platforms, pricing, API integrations, and negotiations. @bolna_dev puts a full stop to that. Every speech-to-text [STT] engine, all text-to-speech [TTS] voices, and an exhaustive list of LLMs. Everything is fully orchestrated under one roof. Your team gets the right Voice AI agent precision-built for your custom solutions. Voice AI is moving at breakneck speed. Quit shopping. Start building.

India doesn't wait on hold anymore. The country is talking to AI voice agents in its own language, on its own terms. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, millions of calls explicitly exhibiting that the voice AI heat is real and spreading fast. Every hotspot on this map is a region choosing AI over traditional call handling. Good chance, the next voice you hear when you call your bank, your insurance company, your delivery app... is the one we've built! The voices powering conversations that feel human, that's what we do here at @bolna_dev.

12M+ calls and counting. If you've spoken to a human-like voice AI agent in India, there's a good chance you were talking to a Bolna voice AI agent. From just 7,000 calls in January 2025 to 12M+ until yesterday, the growth has been exponential. India is the fastest moving Voice AI playground in the world right now and @bolna_dev is right at the heart of it. 1.4B+ people. Gearing up for a billion calls.

𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐲 𝐌𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. Each student applies to multiple unis. Imagine giving each of these students a personalised experience? Impossible in 2024. Live on @bolna_dev today.

Holi was approaching and a leading q-comm had 1000s of warehouse leads sitting in their database. Recruiters were burning 2 full days per lead batch, and by the time they got to someone, it was too late... That's why they came to @bolna_dev We're good at solving problems

YC Startup Preschool India

𝐅𝐢𝐱𝐞𝐝 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞! Our Pay-as-you-go was built for developers. Bring your own keys, pay per token, ship fast. That's not changing. But we're adding something new. Over the last few months, we've been genuinely impressed by the kind of teams building on @bolna_dev Universities running admission helplines. Clinics handling patient follow-ups. SMBs qualifying leads at scale. Traditional businesses doing serious things with Voice AI. The problem? Every time a new model drops, they have to re-evaluate costs, purchase credits, experiment again, and still can't get volume discounts without proving scale first. It's a bad loop. Today we're fixing this! Flat pricing. Covers everything - models, telephony, orchestration, dispositions, observabilty Starts at INR 5.5 per minute, drops over 50% at scale. Additionally...we're closely tracking model usage and product led growth and have a clear plan to add more models and further reduce this over the next 6 months!

Voice AI questions from Indian enterprises, 12 months apart. 2025: Will customers realise it's a bot? 2026: What's your p95 TTFT and barge-in latency? 2025: Does it work in Hindi? 2026: What's the WER on Marathi code-switching? 2025: Won't humans be cheaper? 2026: Cost per qualified lead across STT, LLM, TTS, telephony? @bolna_dev

Bolna has been recognised as one of India's Top 100 AI Startups by @Zinnov, Activate & @IndiasporaForum. Indian enterprises are still running customer operations on manual calls, legacy IVRs, and expensive BPOs or headcount-heavy call centres. Voice is how India does business. Yet the infrastructure hasn't really caught up. @bolna_dev builds Voice AI agents for Indian enterprises. Agents that sound human, speak Indian languages, handle real conversations, and fit into existing workflows without months of integration. Sales. Support. Collections. Onboarding. All of it, automated with agents that your customers won't be able to tell apart from a human. That's what we're building. And it's still Day 1 for us. Back to shipping. Full report here: zinnov.com/innovation/100…

High volume hiring breaks at one specific point. The gap between a lead coming in and someone actually calling them. A Q-commerce company was hiring warehouse staff at scale during the Holi. Thousands of leads, each needing a basic screening call. By the time recruiters reached most of them, they had already moved on. They deployed @bolna_dev voice agents to streamline their hiring process. The agents contacted leads from the Meta hiring campaign within minutes of registration, asking targeted checklist questions including shift readiness, relocation, document availability, and compensation before progressing them further in the hiring funnel. If you're still calling every potential hire manually, this might be worth a look.

Bolna is giving $100 worth of call credits to all @ycombinator students as part of AI Student Starter Pack. Excited to see what YC students build with @bolna_dev. We believe that the best students should have access to the best tools to bring their ideas to life. To apply, check: deals.ycombinator.com/students

At the end of the day, quality is the only true moat @bolna_dev

The last quarter has been one to remember at @bolna_dev. We raised $6.3M led by @generalcatalyst, showcased at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, and took the stage at AIBoomi Annual '26 in Chennai. Three months. Tons of incredible milestones. And we're only bracing for the incredible ride this is going to be. Are you joining us along? Come build with us: bolna.ai/careers

And that's a wrap on Q1 at @bolna_dev! Three months in, we have already beaten everything we could quantify from all of 2025. Honestly, not surprising with the pace that voice AI is compounding universally across all domains, with us right in the middle of it. Are we scared? A bit. Exhilarated? Completely. The zeal to build only gets stronger from here. Are you building a voice AI agent for your enterprise yet?