Exotel, a Bengaluru-based cloud communications company, acqui-hired the core team of voice AI startup Dubverse, including co-founders Anuja Dhawan and Varshul Gupta, the company announced on April 8, 2026. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Dhawan will lead Exotel's Conversation Quality Analytics (CQA) product and Gupta will head the company's AI work. Exotel said the team's experience in multilingual voice generation, speech synthesis and conversational AI would strengthen its voice AI and conversational intelligence products.
The deal covered the team rather than the company. The announcements did not say what would happen to Dubverse's own dubbing product or its users.
What Dubverse built
Dubverse was founded in 2021 by Varshul Gupta, also known as Varshul CW, and Anuja Dhawan. It built an AI software-as-a-service platform for dubbing video into other languages, with the stated aim of making every video multilingual.
Its tools covered AI video dubbing, AI subtitles, video translation, text-to-speech and transcript generation. Users could create, review and share dubbed files themselves, and the platform produced videos ready to publish. Inc42 reported that the company claimed more than 3 million users across more than 70 languages.
Kalaari Capital partner Vamshi Reddy said at the time of the seed round that there was a strong need for multilingual content, pointing to more than 100 million creators in India. The founders' later work for Exotel shifts that language technology from creators' videos to enterprise customer calls.
Exotel's CEO said the team had built voice and language AI models from scratch and put them into production, which he described as the kind of depth that comes as a team rather than one hire at a time.
“The Dubverse team built voice and language AI models from scratch and shipped them in production.”
The founders and the funding
Dubverse raised $800,000 in seed funding in June 2022 in a round led by Kalaari Capital. At the time the company said it would use the money to expand its technology to produce publish-ready dubbed videos in more than 10 Indian languages and more than 20 international languages.
Kalaari Capital remained the startup's main named backer. No later funding rounds were reported, and neither company disclosed Dubverse's headcount or how many people moved to Exotel.
Gupta said in the announcement that building AI for India is fundamentally different. Dhawan said most enterprises review only a small fraction of their customer conversations, which is the problem the CQA product she now leads is meant to address.
Why Exotel wants the team
Exotel was founded in 2011 and provides cloud telephony and customer communication services to businesses. It says it serves more than 7,000 enterprises and handles more than 20 billion interactions a year in sectors including financial services, healthcare, commerce and public services. Its platform combines voice AI, contact centre software and communications APIs.
The company plans to use the Dubverse team to build out CQA, which aims to analyse every customer interaction in real time instead of relying on quality checks of a sample of calls. Chief executive and co-founder Shivakumar Ganesan said most enterprises lack visibility into the majority of their customer conversations.
Exotel described the acqui-hire as part of a broader plan to deepen its AI stack and build an AI-first customer engagement platform.
Ganesan said Exotel's CQA product was meant to fix the fact that most enterprises have no view of the large majority of their customer conversations. Exotel said its platform is aimed at markets such as India that are multilingual and heavy on compliance.
Exotel's backers and finances
According to Inc42, Exotel has raised more than $87 million from investors including Steadview Capital, 360 ONE Asset, Blume Ventures, A91 Partners, Binny Bansal and Deep Kalra. Tenacity Ventures joined its shareholder base in 2025 through a secondary transaction.
Inc42, citing filings via Tofler, reported that Exotel turned profitable in the 2025 financial year with a net profit of ₹28.5 crore (about $3.4 million), compared with a loss of ₹50.6 crore (about $6.1 million) a year earlier. Operating revenue rose 75% to ₹458 crore (about $55 million) from ₹262.2 crore (about $31.6 million).
The deal also followed a leadership change: co-founder Ishwar Sridharan left Exotel in September 2025 after 14 years with the company.
