The Problem: Customer Support in Financial Services Is Built to Deflect, Not Resolve
Digital adoption in Financial Services has surged, and customer call volumes have grown with it. Yet most inbound support still runs on human-heavy contact centres fronted by IVRs and rule-based bots.
These bots handle simple, single-intent queries. The complex ones, such as a double EMI debit, a disbursement that never arrived, or a KYC name mismatch, still fall through to human agents. These cases are a small share of call volume but drive a disproportionate share of support cost. In a regulated industry, a wrong action is also a compliance and reputational event.
Most of today’s voice AI is built for outbound campaigns: reminders, collections, lead qualification. Resolving open-ended inbound calls needs a fundamentally different stack, one that can understand intent, pull context across systems and execute the workflow behind the request.
Karta AI: Agentic Voice AI That Resolves Inbound Calls End to End
Karta AI is a multi-intent, agentic Voice AI platform built for inbound operations at financial services companies. Instead of routing or deflecting calls, Karta’s agents integrate with a customer’s CRMs, APIs, dialers and ticketing tools, detect intent, assemble context in real time and complete the operational workflow.
Three elements of its architecture stand out:
- Stateful context engine: compiles SOPs, policies and past conversations into machine-executable procedures, so the agent acts on defined steps rather than just reasoning through them.
- Adherence engine: enforces every SOP step without skipping or assuming, producing auditable, compliance-grade outcomes.
- Self-learning SLM: tuned for Indian telephony, languages and Hinglish, and improved by every resolved call.
Before our investment, Karta had already shown strong validation. It has 10+ live customers across leading FinTech and payments companies, with revenue growing sharply as existing customers expand their deployments. Customers report 60–80% automation of inbound calls and significant cost reductions. Karta has also displaced established voice AI vendors in competitive evaluations.
Why We Invested: The Cedar Hill Capital Thesis
Our conviction in Karta rests on five pillars:
- A clear and costly pain point for financial services companies: Complex L2/L3 support queries drive a large share of operating cost in FinTech and banking contact centres, and today’s tools stop at deflection.
- A differentiated, hard-to-replicate architecture: Inbound resolution is a stateful, multi-intent problem, not a feature extension of outbound calling. Production learnings compound with every resolved call and cannot be bought with capital or headcount.
- Strong early market validation: Marquee customers, expanding deployments and a consistent record of winning against incumbents show real product-market fit.
- A large, fast-growing market: The global conversational AI market is projected to grow from roughly $17.7B in 2026 to nearly $79B by 2033, and India’s market is expected to grow from about $455M to $1.85B by 2030. Agentic voice is the faster-growing, higher-value layer within it.
- A platform that extends beyond voice: The same context engine powers agents for support, sales, retention and document processing, opening a path from voice agents to autonomous AI employees across financial services operations.
Why This Team
Karta is led by Vijaypal Singh and Abhishek Kushwaha. Vijaypal brings 17+ years in product management across Razorpay and Practo, and is an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Bombay. Abhishek brings 14+ years in tech, AI and data science from Brillio and Walmart Global Tech, and is also an IIT Bombay alumnus.
Their skills are complementary: product and go-to-market depth on one side, AI and engineering depth on the other. They are also deeply involved with customers, and have shown the ability to attract a strong early team from companies like Walmart and Razorpay.
Financial institutions are moving from chatbots that answer to agents that act. As call volumes grow and regulatory scrutiny of grievance redressal tightens, platforms that can resolve complex requests reliably will become core operational infrastructure.
We are excited to partner with Vijaypal, Abhishek and the Karta team as they scale across India and global markets, building the next generation of AI-led customer operations for Financial Services.