Arrowhead raises $3M led by Stellaris to build human-like Voice AI for BFSI

Arrowhead, a Voice AI platform building human-like, high-converting sales agents for the financial services sector, has raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with participation from marquee angel investors including Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), Madhusudanan R (Founder, M2P), and senior fintech executives Keyur Rajiv Kashikar (Turtlemint), Pramod Mohandas (Kissht), and Shadab Shamim (Kissht)—all of whom are also Arrowhead customers. The funding will be used to strengthen Arrowhead’s core AI models, expand its technology and go-to-market teams, and drive higher conversion outcomes for financial services sales.

Arrowhead was founded by Devyani Gupta, a Wharton alumni and former BCG consultant, and Vengadanathan Srinivasan, a software engineer with over a decade of experience across leading technology companies including AWS, Rippling, Uber, and Airbnb. The company enables banks, NBFCs and fintechs in India and globally replicate their top-performer sales agent behaviour at scale through ultra-human Voice AI bots that deliver the highest-converting conversations.

“Indian enterprises have long relied on large human sales teams because labour was considered inexpensive, but this has led to significant inefficiencies, from training and attrition to mis-selling and inconsistent outcomes,” said Devyani Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Arrowhead. “We’re building voice AI agents that can handle long, complex sales conversations while delivering meaningfully better conversion outcomes. What’s exciting is how quickly financial institutions are now moving from pilots to full-scale adoption.”

At the core of Arrowhead’s platform is a completely home-grown orchestration layer that enables Voice AI bots to conduct conversations lasting up to 20 minutes without customers realising they are speaking to a bot. The platform is designed to deliver natural, compliant conversations and consistently strong responses at scale. From August to October alone last year, Arrowhead grew its ARR 5x, reflecting rapid enterprise adoption. To date, every proof-of-concept Arrowhead has participated in has converted into a go-live deployment, with the company yet to lose a single POC.

For one of India’s largest financial institutions, Arrowhead’s Voice AI bots now conduct full-length health insurance sales calls, delivering 45% higher conversion rates than human agents and fully replacing manual calling operations. In another deployment, Arrowhead enabled a financial services company to reach 100% of its customer base for insurance renewals, resulting in a 20% increase in renewal rates, where human agents previously lacked capacity.

Vardhan Dharnidharka, Principal at Stellaris Venture Partners, said, “Voice AI for the financial sector in India alone represents a $3 billion market, with less than $50 million penetrated so far, highlighting how early we still are in this transition. What’s particularly striking is the speed at which banks and financial institutions are now adopting voice AI, driven by top-down, organisation-wide AI mandates. Arrowhead’s focus on delivering superior conversion outcomes, combined with its strong traction among leading financial institutions, positions it well to capture this opportunity as the market scales.”

Arrowhead currently operates across India and Southeast Asia, serving over 50 customers across a range of BFSI use cases. The company works with leading institutions including Bank of Baroda Cards, Aditya Birla Capital, Paytm, Tata 1MG, upGrad, Kissht, Equentis, TurtleMint, InsuranceDekho, Mudra Fincorp, among many others.

“Arrowhead completely surpassed anything we could have expected. We achieved up to 45% higher conversion rates and were able to reach as much as 15x the volume of customers than previously. They were the only voice AI company I fully trusted to execute my vision.” said Shrey Agarwal, Vice President, Paytm.

Over the next 12–18 months, Arrowhead plans to deepen its BFSI-specific conversation models, invest in infrastructure supporting tens of thousands of concurrent calls with sub-500ms latency, and develop emotion-aware voice agents as it expands into a unified omnichannel customer interaction platform across chat, calls, and messaging.