Every consumer enterprise knows the quiet, exhausting reality of the outbound contact center. We need to qualify leads, recover abandoned carts, or walk users through complex KYC. The traditional playbook? Hire massive armies of telecallers, wrestle with brutal attrition, and watch customer acquisition costs (CAC) spiral out of control. The alternative has always been rigid, robotic IVR systems that infuriate customers and crater conversion rates. For years, scaling inside sales meant choosing between expensive human friction or terrible customer experience.
It takes founders with deep operational empathy and the sheer technical courage to rewire an entire industry from the ground up to build a system that elegantly fixes this. That is exactly what Apurv Agrawal, Kanika Jain, and Vikas Gulati have done with SquadStack.
Founded in 2014, the team is building a deeply intelligent, AI-native sales and customer experience platform purpose-built for the massive, multilingual complexity of India.
The engineering under the hood is beautiful in its pragmatism. SquadStack deploys proprietary, human-like Voice AI agents trained on over 600 million minutes of real Indian conversations. These autonomous agents are capable of handling 30-turn conversations, seamlessly code-switching across eight Indian languages, and gracefully managing interruptions without losing context. But crucially, the team refused the false choice between total automation and human touch. SquadStack operates on a hybrid intelligence model: the AI handles the massive volume of routine outreach, and the moment true empathy or complex negotiation is required.
The true moat here is uncompromising, outcome-driven scale. SquadStack’s voice models are so remarkably fluid that they were the first to pass the Turing Test for contact centers — in blind tests, an overwhelming majority of BFSI leaders couldn’t tell the AI apart from a human. By orchestrating everything from smart lead qualification to AI-driven quality audits on 100% of calls, the platform abstracts away the soul-crushing busywork of managing a traditional BPO. It shifts the paradigm entirely from tracking billable hours to delivering guaranteed business outcomes — dropping acquisition costs by up to 3x while driving significantly higher conversions.
The market? India’s largest consumer brands, from fast-scaling fintechs and brokerages like AngelOne to logistics giants like Delhivery, who desperately need to engage millions of consumers daily without breaking their unit economics.
Seeing homegrown founders head-down, architecting the deep-tech infrastructure that fundamentally modernizes how the world’s fastest-growing economy communicates, is profoundly inspiring. They took one of the most unglamorous, friction-heavy industries and rebuilt it with intelligence, scale, and grace.
Let’s celebrate the builders.
w/ Jay Ingle
