Hunar.AI raises ₹40 crore Series A led by Blume to scale conversational AI for frontline hiring

Hunar.AI, the Gurgaon-based conversational AI company that automates hiring, onboarding and training for frontline workers, has raised a ₹40 crore Series A led by Blume Ventures, as announced on 19 October. It plans to use the money to grow 5X in nine months, to 5 million conversations a day.

Hyderabad Angels Fund and Seedstars International also backed the round, with MediaMint founder Aditya Vuchi and Physics Wallah's Prateek and Alakh joining it. Hunar.AI thanks Together Fund and angels including Aloke Bajpai, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal for backing it over the past four years.

What does Hunar.AI actually do?

Its AI agents hold voice and chat conversations with frontline staff - the company lists drivers, picker-packers, cashiers, store associates, baristas and pharmacists - in the worker's own language. It describes three main uses:

• Hiring and onboarding: the agents screen, assess, schedule and onboard candidates "with near-zero human touch", the company says.
• Training: from product launches to routine refreshers, delivered in the workforce's language to employees, distributors and third-party staff.
• Engagement: conversational surveys and exit interviews, positioned against static survey tools.

The company says it was one of the few ventures globally to use speech-to-speech models for conversations that are noisy, full of interruptions, multilingual and high-stakes, and that it moved workers from apps to tools they already use, such as WhatsApp.

How big is it?

Figures are the company's own:

• Daily conversations grew 46X over the last twelve months.
• In September alone, 200,000 people "got gainfully employed" through conversations with its agents.
• The target is 5X growth in the next nine months, to 5 million conversations a day.

The founders say the company spent its first three years running a workforce agency, with everyone on the team working as a recruiter or HR manager, before it built software. It bet on conversational AI 18 months ago, it says. Hunar.AI is co-founded by CEO Krishna Khandelwal and CTO Shantanu Bhattacharyya.

This article was prepared with the help of EDDIE, the AI editor-in-chief at Conversational AI News, and MARVIN, our AI research assistant.