Equal AI, an Indian startup that built an AI assistant to answer phone calls on your behalf, has raised $30 million in a Series B led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital. Think Investments and Valiant Fund also participated, alongside individual investors including PhonePe founder Sameer Nigam and Meta’s India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya Devanathan. Total funding now exceeds $42 million.

The problem is simple and enormous. Indian consumers receive a relentless stream of calls from delivery drivers, insurance agents, financial service companies, scammers, and recruiters. “If you are buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls over a week, and that is hard to tackle for a human,” founder Keshav Reddy told TechCrunch.

Equal AI’s Android app screens unknown calls by answering them with an AI agent that asks why the person is calling. It shows the user a summary of the reason on screen, along with quick reply options like “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor.” The AI reads the selected reply back to the caller. Users can also type a custom message. Every call is recorded with a transcription and summary available in the app.

Since launching last year, the app has grown to more than one million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily actives. The company built support for more than 10 Indian languages, including code-mixing, the common practice of blending multiple languages in a single sentence. English support alone is not enough for the Indian market.

The funding round has an unusual structure. It is split into three tranches, each at a different valuation depending on whether the startup hits predetermined targets. The approach, which is growing but still uncommon, lets a startup advertise its highest valuation even if most of the equity was sold at a lower price. Equal AI declined to share its specific valuations.

The startup was founded in 2022 by Reddy, who comes from the family behind Indian conglomerate GVK, which has holdings in infrastructure, energy, and healthcare. Equal started as a data-sharing company for financial services and still offers KYC verification and financial data analysis alongside the consumer app.

Competition is real. Google and Apple both have call screening products. Truecaller, a household name in India with hundreds of millions of users, is building its own AI assistant features. In the US, a16z-backed Cloaked launched call screening last year. Prosus’s Thiago Viana said Equal’s local context understanding gives it an edge.

Next steps include screening calls from known numbers, making outbound calls on a user’s behalf to book appointments, an iOS version, and a paid subscription tier. Prosus has been investing in AI assistants for local markets, including Spain’s Luzia and Latin America’s Zapia. Both were hit by Meta’s ban on third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, which is why Equal AI built around calls and its own app rather than piggybacking on a messaging platform. The lesson: platform dependency is the risk that kills distribution.

In India, consumers receive a lot of calls every day, ranging from spam and scams to delivery people and financial service companies trying to contact them. There are apps like Truecaller and the government’s Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system to identify who is calling, but knowing the name of the caller is often not enough. That is why Equal AI is creating an assistant that can receive calls on your behalf, gather information, and tell you why someone is calling.

The app is currently available on Android, and since its launch last year, it has grown to more than a million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users, it says. The app screens the call and displays the reason someone is calling you.

The dialer shows quick reply options like “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor,” and the AI reads them back to the caller. You can also type a custom message for the AI to read out. The app records the call, and users can see the recording and transcription history with a summary in the app.

Equal AI said today it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital with participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors include Indian fintech PhonePe’s founder Sameer Nigam, Zubin Bharti Mittal from Airtel Family Office, Skyflow AI co-founder Anshu Sharma, Meta India and Southeast Asia’s VP Sandhya Devanathan, and CtrlS Datacenters’ Chairman Sridhar Pinnapureddy. With the new funding, the company has raised over $42 million to date.

The round is structured in three tranches, with the startup carrying a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it hits predetermined targets — a growing but still uncommon approach in which startups sell equity at different prices within the same round. The structure has an unusual quirk: it lets a startup advertise the highest valuation achieved, even if the bulk of the equity was sold at a lower one. Equal AI declined to provide its specific valuations.

The startup was founded by Keshav Reddy in 2022. Reddy comes from the family behind Indian conglomerate GVK, which has holdings across infrastructure, energy, and healthcare. Equal started as a data-sharing company for financial services and still offers data for financial analysis and know your customer (KYC) verification services for employers.

“We always wanted to be a customer-facing company, and with Equal AI, the first use case we launched was a call assistant because we realized users get a ton of calls for financial services or job openings. If you are buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls over a week, and that is hard to tackle for a human,” founder Reddy told TechCrunch about why the company started there.

The app currently only screens unknown calls, but the company is planning to introduce the ability to screen calls from known numbers too. The company also wants the AI assistant to take proactive action on a user’s behalf — such as texting a delivery person your address (with consent) or making outbound calls to book appointments. The startup said it is also working on an iOS version of the app and a paid subscription tier with more features.

Equal AI is using a mix of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models with its own orchestration layer. English support matters, but consumers in India often speak in their native language or blend multiple languages in a single sentence — a phenomenon called code-mixing. Equal AI says it has built support for over 10 languages with this in mind.

The startup has stiff competition. Google and Apple both have call screening products. Truecaller, already a household name in India, has been building out its own AI assistant features. In the U.S., a16z-backed privacy startup Cloaked also launched call screening last year. Thiago Viana, global co-head at Prosus Ventures, said that Equal’s understanding of local context gives it an edge.

“Equal AI promises to screen calls for you and provide context on why someone is calling. We think that if an app does well in a few use cases, it can quickly become popular in its niche and create user stickiness to expand in different areas later on,” he told TechCrunch by phone.

Prosus has been investing in AI assistant startups that focus on local markets. Its portfolio includes Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia. Both were caught up in Meta’s ban on third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, which serves as a cautionary tale for platform dependency. Equal AI said that it didn’t want to create that kind of dependency — which is why it built around calls and its own app rather than piggybacking on a messaging platform.

TikTok appears to be testing voice calling inside direct messages, a move that could put the short-video app in more direct competition with instant messaging apps like Messenger and WhatsApp. Jonah Manzano on X recently spotted the feature and shared screenshots, including an incoming call notification labeled “TikTok Audio” and a phone icon added to the DM interface.

From voice notes to calls

The feature seemingly works as a standard audio call initiated from within a DM conversation. Based on Manzano’s testing, it requires both users to be friends on the platform before a call can be placed. A “Mute calls” toggle also appears in the DM settings menu alongside the existing “Mute messages” option, suggesting TikTok has built out the necessary notification controls to support the feature.

TikTok added voice notes to DMs in August last year, along with photo and video attachments. Voice calling would be the next step up, turning the messaging tab into something closer to a full communications tool.

More time in the app

The expansion fits TikTok’s broader push to keep users inside the platform rather than switching to a separate app to chat. Over the past two years, TikTok has added group chats, DM streaks, broadcast channels, and voice notes in quick succession. The platform also recently added a hidden emoji mini-game to DMs that works in both one-on-one and group chats, another small hook designed to keep users in the app longer.

Adding calls brings it closer to the feature set of Instagram and Snapchat, both of which support in-app audio calling. TikTok has not confirmed the feature or announced a wider rollout yet, but it shouldn’t be long before voice calls reach a broader audience.

It took one sentence from Jensen Huang to move tens of billions of dollars. Marvell Technology shares surged about 25% in premarket trading on Tuesday after Nvidia’s chief executive, sharing a Computex stage in Taipei with Marvell boss Matt Murphy, predicted that the chip and networking company would be the next business to reach a $1tn valuation. That would be more than five times its current size.

Marvell’s valuation will climb now that the age of “useful AI has arrived,” Huang said, framing the company as a beneficiary of the same data-centre boom that has carried his own.

The Santa Clara firm makes the custom chips and optical interconnects that move data around AI clusters, the unglamorous plumbing of the boom rather than the headline processors. Its stock has gained roughly 158% this year, giving it a market value of about $192bn before Tuesday’s jump. If the premarket gain holds at the open, it would be Marvell’s biggest intraday move since May 2023.

Huang is not a disinterested cheerleader. Nvidia invested around $2bn in Marvell earlier this year, part of an effort to knit the smaller company’s custom silicon and networking gear more tightly into its own systems.

The endorsement, in other words, talks up a company Nvidia already owns a slice of, which is worth keeping in mind when a $5.4tn chief executive names the next member of his club.

The forecast landed amid a run of bullish chip news on the same day. Memory maker SK Hynix said it would double production capacity to ease a supply crunch. STMicroelectronics nearly doubled its 2026 data-centre revenue forecast, to about $1bn, and said sales could double again in 2027.

Arm said it expects to reach its $15bn semiconductor revenue target earlier than planned. The common thread is AI infrastructure spending, which the largest tech companies, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft among them, have pledged to fund to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars this year.

Nvidia has been the clearest winner of that spending, its shares up more than 1,400% since 2023 and its market value around $5.4tn. Much of the demand now flows through the kind of connective hardware Marvell sells, and Nvidia has been pouring money into the surrounding ecosystem, including a multibillion-dollar bet on the photonics meant to replace copper inside data centres. Huang used the same Taipei stage this year to call Taiwan the “epicentre” of the AI build-out.

Roughly 15 companies carried market values above $1tn as of Monday, almost all of them in technology. Marvell is not the most valuable company below that line; dozens are worth more. What it has, for now, is the loudest endorsement, and the share price to show for it. Whether the trillion follows is a different question, and one a Computex soundbite does not answer.

TL;DR

IBM stock surged 10% after Barclays initiated coverage with an overweight rating and $350 target, arguing that IBM’s infrastructure software is the “good part” of enterprise software immune to AI disruption. The gains extend a 30% May rally driven by a $10 billion quantum computing commitment and Trump administration funding.

IBM stock surged 10% on Monday after Barclays initiated coverage with an overweight rating and a $350 price target, roughly 11% above the opening price. The jump extends a run that has seen IBM gain nearly 30% in May alone, its best monthly performance in almost 24 years. The stock is now up 10% year to date, erasing losses from the SaaSpocalypse selloff that hit software stocks earlier in the year.

Barclays’ bull case is not primarily about quantum computing, though that features prominently. The core thesis centres on IBM’s infrastructure software portfolio, which serves large, heavily regulated enterprises and generates the majority of the company’s profit. In a market where vibe coding and AI agents are threatening horizontal SaaS companies, Barclays argues that IBM’s type of software, deeply embedded infrastructure tools, is precisely the category least vulnerable to disruption.

The software thesis

“While software has a negative investor connotation at the moment, IBM is offering infrastructure software (the good part) to large, often heavily regulated customers, which creates a very sticky set-up that should not see negative AI implications,” the analysts wrote. They expect mid-single-digit organic revenue growth and ongoing margin expansion, describing IBM as “a stable earnings compounder with a Quantum option.”

The distinction matters. The SaaSpocalypse punished software stocks indiscriminately, but the companies most exposed are those selling horizontal tools, project management, CRM, form builders, that AI can replicate. IBM’s software business, which includes middleware, database management, and enterprise integration platforms, sits at the infrastructure layer where switching costs are measured in years and compliance requirements create natural moats.

In their most optimistic bull case, Barclays set a price target of $449, representing 51% upside from the last close.

Quantum as “option value”

Barclays framed IBM’s quantum computing ambitions as additional upside rather than the primary investment thesis. “Quantum computing has the potential to become the next major compute paradigm, following the CPU and GPU eras,” the analysts wrote, comparing IBM’s positioning in quantum to Nvidia’s dominance in GPUs. Quantinuum’s massively oversubscribed IPO last week demonstrated that investor appetite for quantum exposure is running hot.

IBM has committed $10 billion to quantum computing over the next five years, according to a regulatory filing disclosed last week. The centrepiece is Anderon, a standalone quantum chip foundry headquartered in Albany, New York, built with $1 billion from the US Department of Commerce under the CHIPS Act and a matching $1 billion from IBM. Anderon will operate the first purpose-built 300-millimetre quantum wafer fabrication facility in the United States.

The Commerce Department’s $2 billion quantum portfolio, split across nine companies and announced on 21 May, is the largest single quantum R&D commitment in US history. IBM received the largest share. Smaller firms including D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and their European counterparts are pursuing different quantum architectures with their own government backing.

The Trump clip

Adding a distinctly 2026 element to the rally is a video of President Trump from a December 2025 White House business roundtable, which has been recirculating on X and Reddit. Trump called IBM CEO Arvind Krishna “a legend” and said, “He’s taken the stock from a rather low price to a very nice price. I won’t say high because I’m sure you’re going to say it’s going to go up a lot more, right?”

Social media posts framed the clip as Trump endorsing IBM stock. Trump’s personal investment account has purchased IBM shares in recent months, according to Office of Government Ethics filings. The combination of a presidential mention, visible government support through the quantum funding programme, and a Barclays initiation has created a momentum loop that draws both institutional and retail interest simultaneously.

The bigger picture

IBM’s recent gains fit into a broader pattern of legacy computing companies finding new relevance in the AI era. Dell’s stock surged 32% last week on AI server demand. Cisco, once a dot-com era cautionary tale, has rallied on enterprise networking demand driven by AI infrastructure buildouts. IBM’s version of the story combines two threads: a software business that is defensible against AI disruption, and a quantum computing programme that could become transformative if the technology matures on schedule.

Whether the quantum option alone justifies the current run is debatable. IBM’s quantum programme is real and well-funded, but commercial quantum computing remains years away from generating meaningful revenue. Barclays is explicit that the investment case rests on the software business today and quantum as future upside. For investors burned by the SaaSpocalypse, the appeal of a software company whose customers cannot easily leave, and whose product category AI makes more valuable rather than obsolete, is straightforward.