Funding Societies scales outreach across Southeast Asia with ElevenLabs’ Conversational AI

Funding Societies partnered with ElevenLabs to automate the top of their sales funnel with human-sounding AI voices. The result: thousands of calls every day, with human agents joining only after the AI filters and qualifies the initial conversation.

As Southeast Asia’s largest SME digital financing platform, Funding Societies is operating in five markets. With a mission to provide underserved SMEs access to financing, they support businesses across the region with loans, working capital, and financial services.

Making over 1,000 daily leads – without human agents.

As they grew, scaling outreach across thousands of potential customers – across multiple countries and languages – posed a real challenge.

Custom voices that reflect the brand

To keep every call natural and on-brand, Funding Societies recorded over two hours of real agent audio to train custom voice models using ElevenLabs’ advanced Voice Cloning. These clones match the tone, pacing, and professionalism of their CX team at scale.

The system is powered by ElevenLabs Conversational AI and integrates with Twilio for call delivery. It uses structured knowledge and behavioral prompts to keep responses aligned with brand standards.

This enabled a powerful multilingual voice agent that handles interruptions smoothly, guides prospects through financing options, and mirrors a live agent’s cadence, vocabulary, and regional accent to preserve authenticity.

Choosing the most human-like option

While evaluating providers, the Funding Societies team prioritized voice quality, latency, and ease of deployment. ElevenLabs stood out for its expressive and realistic speech, smooth turn-taking, and rapid integration process – all crucial for making their AI agents sound human and act fast.

“For an AI agent to feel human, latency matters as much as voice quality. ElevenLabs offered the right balance,” said Debojyoti Chakraborty, Sr. Engineering Manager at Funding Societies.

For an AI agent to feel human, latency matters as much as voice quality. ElevenLabs offered the right balance

Skala upp effekten i arbetsflöden

Conversational AI now handles the first contact with potential customers. This gives Funding Societies a scalable way to reach more SMEs every day without adding to the team.

To ensure no opportunity is missed, they also built a voicemail detection system. If a call ends with prolonged silence, marked by a termination reason like “Ending conversation after X seconds of silence” in ElevenLabs’ call logs, the system flags it as voicemail. These contacts are automatically routed to a human agent for follow-up.

They are now expanding voice automation beyond sales too. New workflows include payment reminders, collections, and post-loan engagement – all tailored to local markets and use cases.

By automating both acquisition and lifecycle communication, they're building a scalable, always-on engagement layer that frees human teams to focus on depth over volume.

Looking to scale outbound or inbound calls with natural-sounding voices and contextual intelligence? Get in touch.