Hunar.AI, a Bengaluru-based conversational AI company, has raised Rs 40 crore in a Series A round led by Blume Ventures, taking its total funding to Rs 65 crore. The round also drew Hyderabad Angels Fund, Together Fund, Seedstars, AVNM Ventures, and a clutch of individual backers including PhysicsWallah co-founders Prateek Maheshwari and Alakh Pandey. Founded in 2022 by Krishna Khandelwal and Shantanu Bhattacharyya, the company builds voice and chat agents that handle candidate screening, interview scheduling, onboarding, training, and retention for frontline and blue-collar workforces, running over voice calls, WhatsApp, and chat. Its client list includes Swiggy, Delhivery, Instamart, Flipkart, and Blue Dart, and the company says its agents handled more than 15 million conversations in September 2026 alone.
The pitch to investors is straightforward: India’s frontline workforce, the delivery riders, warehouse pickers, and gig staff that logistics and quick commerce companies hire and lose in enormous volume, has outgrown the HR tooling built for white-collar attrition rates. An AI agent that can call, screen, and onboard thousands of candidates a day without a recruiter on the line is a real cost argument, and the enterprise logos make that case for themselves.
The buyer isn’t the one who has to trust it
Every enterprise AI funding story gets written around the logo wall: who signed, how fast they scaled, what the retention curve looks like. That’s a real signal, and it’s also the easier half of the story. The harder half is what happens on the other side of the call, where a prospective delivery worker, often applying for their first formal job interview of any kind, hears a voice agent instead of a person and has to decide in the first ten seconds whether to keep talking or hang up.
That decision doesn’t show up in an enterprise contract. It shows up in a completion rate nobody outside the company gets to see, and it compounds the same way customer trust compounds everywhere else on this site: slowly, invisibly, until it’s either an asset or a leak large enough to explain a client’s declining fill rate.
Why this is a trust product wearing an HR-tech label
Hunar.AI is selling workflow automation to an HR or ops buyer, but what it’s actually asking that buyer to adopt is a new front door for how a company treats the people it hires at scale. A warehouse that already runs on thin margins and high attrition doesn’t need a worker’s first experience of the company to feel like being processed by a machine that mispronounces their name. The companies that get the most out of this kind of tool won’t be the ones that deploy it fastest. They’ll be the ones that treat the voice agent’s script, tone, and escalation path to an actual human as seriously as they’d treat a customer-facing chatbot, because for a huge share of India’s workforce, this interaction is the company’s first impression, not a cost line hidden behind the HR dashboard.
The number that matters next
Fifteen million conversations a month is a scale number. The number that will actually determine whether this category holds up is a trust number nobody has published yet: how many of the workers who go through one of these flows take the job, stay past ninety days, and tell someone else about the experience. That’s the metric that separates a cost-saving tool from a workforce brand asset, and it’s the one worth watching as Hunar.AI and the rest of this category scale past their first big enterprise wins.