"Y Combinator rejected the application from Bolna, a voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before finally accepting it into the fall 2025 batch, skeptical that the founders could turn interest into revenue. "When we were applying for Y-Combinator, the feedback we got was, 'great to see that you have a product that can create realistic voice agents, but Indian enterprises are not going to pay, and you are not going to make money out of this,'" Wagh told TechCrunch."
"The startup applied with the same idea for the fall batch but was able to show it had revenue of more than $25,000 coming in every month for the last few months. At that time, the company was running $100 pilots to help users build voice agents. Now, the startup is pricing those pilots at $500. The momentum has continued. The startup said on Tuesday that it has raised a $6.3M seed round led by General Catalyst."
Voice is a popular communication medium across India, driving enterprise and startup interest in voice AI for customer support, sales, acquisition, hiring, and training. Bolna builds a voice orchestration platform that connects and manages different AI voice technologies, addressing Indian interaction challenges like noise cancellation and caller ID verification. The company faced Y Combinator skepticism and five rejections before acceptance after demonstrating recurring revenue exceeding $25,000 monthly. Bolna raised a $6.3M seed round led by General Catalyst, and shifted pilot pricing from $100 to $500 as it moved from experimentation to monetization.
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