By Joanna Tan · AI in APAC · October 29, 2026

Bengaluru-based Hunar.AI has raised ₹40 crore (about $4.2 million) in a Series A round led by Blume Ventures, with participation from Hyderabad Angels Fund, Together Fund, Seedstars, AVNM Ventures, and a clutch of individual backers including PhysicsWallah co-founders Prateek Maheshwari and Alakh Pandey. The startup will use the funds to strengthen its AI infrastructure, build out its product line, and expand go-to-market efforts.

Founded in 2022 by Krishna Khandelwal and Shantanu Bhattacharyya, Hunar.AI builds conversational AI agents that automate the unglamorous but high-volume work of hiring, onboarding, training, and retaining frontline and gig workers — the calls, follow-ups, and scheduling that recruiters at quick-commerce, logistics, retail, and financial-services firms otherwise handle manually, especially during hiring spikes around festive seasons or expansions.

The platform’s voice agents now operate in more than 20 languages, including Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, letting enterprise clients reach workers in the language they’re most comfortable with. That design has translated into real scale: Hunar’s agents handled over 1.5 crore (15 million) conversations through September 2026, a volume doubling every quarter, for customers including Swiggy, Zepto, Aditya Birla Capital, Bajaj Finserv, Croma, Dr Lal PathLabs, 1mg, and Starbucks.

“Frontline workforce management is one of the largest yet most underserved opportunities in enterprise AI,” said Khandelwal, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

The bet lines up with where India’s labour market is heading: government think tank NITI Aayog projects the country’s gig workforce will more than double from roughly 1 crore workers in FY25 to 2.35 crore by 2029-30. For a market that size, AI aimed squarely at frontline and gig hiring — rather than the white-collar automation that dominates headlines — points to one of the more practical, high-volume growth lanes for enterprise AI in the region.

Source: Inc42, October 19, 2026

Joanna Tan covers AI investment, policy, and the business of AI for AIAPAC.ai Insights.