Bengaluru, April 08: In a major move to solidify its lead in AI-powered customer experience solutions, Exotel has acqui-hired Dubverse’s top team, including co-founders Anuja Dhawan and Varshul Gupta. Starting immediately, Anuja Dhawan will lead Exotel’s Conversation Quality Analytics (CQA) solution, while Varshul Gupta heads AI.
These critical hires mark a decisive step in strengthening Exotel’s AI capabilities for enterprise CX, enabling more scalable and outcome-driven customer engagement. As Dubverse’s co-founders, Dhawan and Gupta bring deep expertise in multilingual voice and language AI, including text-to-speech (TTS), speech synthesis, and content localization. Their knowledge of innovations such as MahaTTS (open-source) and DubX (40+ languages) will enable more natural, context-aware, and regionally adaptive CX.
The acqui-hire aligns with Exotel’s vision of building a unified, AI-first customer engagement ecosystem. Under its “AI and Automation” capability layer, Exotel has been enhancing capabilities across intent detection, sentiment analysis, automation, and conversation intelligence, operationalized through Harmony, its AI-powered CX platform. Additionally, Exotel’s availability on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace enables enterprises to deploy and scale these capabilities globally. This top talent strengthens this foundation by deepening core AI capabilities.
Shivakumar Ganesan, Founder and CEO, Exotel, said,
“Most enterprises are flying blind on 90% of their customer conversations. CQA fixes that. Every conversation, evaluated in real time, against the enterprise’s own standards. The Dubverse team built voice and language AI models from scratch and shipped them in production. That kind of depth doesn’t come one hire at a time. It comes as a team.”
Anuja Dhawan, now leading CQA at Exotel, said,
“Most enterprises today review only a small fraction of their customer conversations, leaving critical insights around quality, compliance, and revenue untapped. At Exotel, with CQA, we are changing that by enabling real-time, full-scale visibility across every interaction, helping organizations move from manual evaluation to continuous, AI-driven decision-making. Having built and scaled AI systems for millions of users, I’m particularly excited to now apply that experience to enterprise CX, where the impact is far more direct and measurable. With Exotel’s scale and distribution, we have a unique opportunity to turn customer conversations from a cost center into a true growth lever”
Varshul Gupta, Head of AI at Exotel, said:
“Over the last few years at Dubverse, I’ve had the chance to go very deep into the speech stack, from text-to-speech and speech synthesis to building multilingual voice systems for real-world Indian use cases, and that journey has taught us that building AI for India is fundamentally different. You have to account for linguistic diversity, code-switching, accent variation, cultural context, and the fact that these systems need to work reliably at scale, centered around the cost sensitive market like India. For me, joining Exotel felt like a very natural next step because it gives us the platform, reach, and enterprise depth to take that work forward in a much bigger way. I’m excited about the opportunity to bring our experience in speech and language AI into customer engagement and help build voice AI that feels natural, works in the real world, and creates meaningful impact for businesses across India and other multilingual, voice-first markets.”
