Exotel acqui-hires Dubverse core team to boost voice AI for enterprises

Exotel on Wednesday said it has acqui-hired the core team of voice AI startup Dubverse, including its co-founders Anuja Dhawan and Varshul Gupta, in a bid to sharpen its focus on conversational intelligence and enterprise customer experience.

The move is aimed at strengthening Exotel’s voice AI stack and accelerating its push into AI-led customer engagement, as enterprises increasingly adopt automation and analytics to manage large volumes of customer interactions. 

Founded in 2011, Exotel provides cloud telephony and communication solutions and has been expanding its offerings to include AI-driven engagement platforms. Dubverse on the other hand, is headquartered in Gurugram. It builds AI-powered speech and audio solutions, including text-to-speech, multilingual voice generation and automated dubbing tools tailored for enterprise use cases.

With the acqui-hire, Exotel plans to integrate Dubverse’s capabilities in multilingual voice generation and conversational technologies into its platform. Dubverse has been building AI-powered speech and audio solutions tailored for enterprise use cases, particularly in linguistically diverse markets such as India.

“Most enterprises are flying blind on 90% of their customer conversations. CQA fixes that. Every conversation, evaluated in real time, against the enterprise's own standards,” said Shivakumar Ganesan. “The Dubverse team built voice and language AI models from scratch and shipped them in production. That kind of depth doesn't come one hire at a time. It comes as a team.”

The integration is expected to bolster Exotel’s conversational quality analytics (CQA) capabilities, enabling enterprises to analyse and act on customer interactions at scale. Anuja Dhawan, who will now lead CQA at Exotel, said most organisations currently review only a small fraction of their customer conversations, leaving critical insights untapped.

“At Exotel, with CQA, we are changing that by enabling real-time, full-scale visibility across every interaction, helping organisations move from manual evaluation to continuous, AI-driven decision-making,” she said, adding that the company’s scale offers an opportunity to turn customer conversations into a growth lever rather than a cost centre.

Varshul Gupta, now head of AI at Exotel, said building voice AI for India requires accounting for linguistic diversity, code-switching and accent variation at scale. “Joining Exotel gives us the platform and enterprise depth to take that work forward in a much bigger way,” he said.

According to Entrackr, Exotel has raised around $100 million from investors including Blume Ventures, A91 Partners and Sistema Asia. The company reported a 10% increase in operating revenue to ₹490.5 crore in FY25 and turned profitable with a net profit of ₹20 crore, compared with a loss in the previous fiscal.