Bengaluru-based startup Hunar.AI is building conversational AI agents that automate frontline workforce management across India’s labour-heavy sectors, addressing a segment of the AI economy that has remained largely untouched while software automation has swept through white-collar workflows. Founded in 2022 by Krishna Khandelwal and Shantanu Bhattacharyya, the company now powers more than 500,000 calls daily, making it among India’s largest voice AI companies by call volume.
Hunar.AI’s client roster includes Swiggy, Zepto, Aditya Birla Capital, Bajaj Finserv, Croma, Dr Lal PathLabs, 1mg, and Starbucks. The startup’s core insight emerged from a structural problem in India’s labour economy.
“Everything else gets disrupted, but this workforce doesn’t. India has a very large labour surplus, massive skill gaps and very poor workforce listening infrastructure,” said Khandelwal, who previously served as chief business officer at logistics platform Locus.
Before building its AI infrastructure, Hunar.AI operated an actual recruitment agency for nearly two years, recording between 40 lakh and 50 lakh minutes of workforce-related conversations covering recruitment, onboarding, assessments, and retention discussions. That dataset became the foundation of its conversational AI stack. Khandelwal noted that most existing voice AI deployments in India focus on simple transactional tasks like EMI reminders, typically lasting under 30 seconds. Hunar.AI’s calls average over three minutes, reflecting the contextual complexity of hiring and training conversations.
The company built a proprietary hybrid audio architecture rather than relying on standard speech-to-text pipelines. A “Dynamic Config Generator” layer filters irrelevant acknowledgements and detects contextual pauses and filler words before sending signals to the inference engine, preserving tonality, speed, and conversational context that matter heavily in hiring decisions. An
“Audio Regenerative Model” reconstructs context in real time after interruptions rather than restarting conversations. The startup also dynamically switches between text-to-speech providers including ElevenLabs and Cartesia depending on regional language performance, gaining stronger adoption for Telugu, Kannada, and Tamil workflows in South India.
Hunar.AI currently operates at an annual recurring revenue of $3 million to $4 million across six sectors including quick commerce, logistics, retail, healthcare diagnostics, banking, and construction. Pricing is function-based, with screening calls priced between ₹15 to ₹20 and onboarding workflows ranging from ₹75 to ₹100. The company is in the process of closing another funding round.
