At Spark Eighteen, we’ve always believed that the future of human-machine interaction isn’t typing. It’s talking. Voice is how we naturally communicate, negotiate, empathise, and persuade. And yet, for years, Voice AI has remained brittle, robotic, and frustratingly limited in high-stakes environments.
That’s exactly why we acquired JAM.
Why JAM? Why Now?
JAM isn’t just another Voice AI startup. Before we even began acquisition conversations, they had already proven their technology in one of the most demanding real-world environments imaginable: recovery calls in the BFSI sector.
Collections and debt recovery are conversations that require extraordinary nuance. They’re emotionally charged, legally sensitive, and unforgiving of error. The industry has long relied on large teams of human agents — because no AI could handle the complexity with the required empathy and precision.
JAM cracked it. Their Voice AI handles recovery calls with measurably better outcomes — higher resolution rates, fewer drop-offs, and a significantly improved borrower experience.
That’s not a demo environment. That’s production-grade Voice AI, battle-tested at scale.
Who Built This
Ashish Khurana and Akshay Dewan started JAM with one conviction: voice is the most natural way humans and machines should communicate, and Indian enterprises deserved better than dressed-up IVR systems.
What followed was one of the steepest technical learning curves in the space. Ashish led the engineering, cutting latency from 3.5 seconds to under 1 second, cracking interruption handling with custom logic so conversations actually feel natural, building multi-agent workflows, and creating a horizontal platform generic enough to scale across verticals without rewriting the core. All while keeping profitability in mind from day one.
Akshay brought product discipline and strategic thinking from his time as a Product Manager at Zomato and his background in financial analysis at Rothschild & Co and S&P Global Market Intelligence. Together, they built something that worked; not just in demos, but in production environments where mistakes have real consequences.
I’ve known Ashish and Akshay from the early days of JAM. We stayed in touch for strategic mentoring and exploring synergies. When the acquisition conversation started, it wasn’t about convincing anyone. It was about recognizing what they’d already built and where we could take it together.
Expanding Across Verticals
The BFSI collections use case is just the beginning. JAM’s core technology is fundamentally a platform for intelligent, goal-oriented voice conversations and that has massive applicability across industries.
Recruitment: Screening is broken. The quality of a candidate call varies enormously depending on which recruiter conducts it, on which day, in which mood. JAM’s Voice AI means every candidate gets the same high-quality, consistent screening conversation with structured feedback delivered instantly to the hiring team. For large-scale hiring in retail, BPO, logistics, and banking, this is transformative.
Training & Enablement: A new collections agent can now practice hundreds of difficult conversations before ever touching a real account. A sales rep can rehearse objection handling at midnight. This isn’t e-learning — it’s live, adaptive, AI-driven simulation that gets better every session.
Internal Operations at Spark Eighteen: We’re deploying this internally too; across creator onboarding, partner outreach, HR queries, and audience engagement experiences tied to our content IP.
Healthcare, Insurance & Government: Looking further ahead — patient follow-up calls, claims assistance, citizen services. Any high-volume structured voice conversation that today requires a human agent is a candidate for deployment.
What This Changes for SP18
We’re now able to provide in-house voice AI solutions to our clients at a fraction of the cost of building from scratch. For conversations under 5 minutes, customer confirmations, payment reminders, support queries, lead qualification — we’ve optimized performance and cost to levels that make this practical for almost any product.
This isn’t a third-party integration you manage separately. It’s infrastructure. If your product needs to have conversations at scale, we can build that as part of the product itself.
What This Means
Voice AI is not a feature. It’s a platform shift. As significant as the move to mobile or cloud.
The organisations that figure out how to deploy intelligent voice agents at scale in the next 24 months will have a structural advantage that is very hard to close.
With JAM in the Spark Eighteen family, we’re positioning ourselves to lead that shift in India and beyond.
To the JAM team — you built something genuinely exceptional. We’re grateful you chose to build the next chapter with us.
This is just the beginning
— Aayush
