Vaani AI Research, a deeptech startup focused on building full-stack, production-grade voice agent infrastructure, has secured $400,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Venture Catalysts.
The round also saw participation from several global operators and industry leaders, including Dr Abhishek Sharma (Meta SuperIntelligence, ex-Apple), Dr Viveka Kulharia (MoonValley), Shashikant Chaudhary (ex-MD, GlobalLogic), Ejaz Ahmed (Meta Reality Labs), Nikhil Tripathi (Bijak), Uday Sodhi (ex-Sony Pictures India), KK Venkata (Oliver Wyman), Swapnil Sheth (IndigoEdge), Michele Barbazza (VAT Group, Switzerland), and others.
The funds will be used to scale Vaani’s voice stack, advance research and development, and expand enterprise partnerships across India, the GCC, and international markets.
Founded in 2024 by Tushar Shinde, Nitesh Tripathi, and Nitish Mishra, the startup draws on its research background from IISc and IIT Madras, along with more than a decade of expertise in artificial intelligence and infrastructure. Vaani describes itself as the “Stripe for Voice AI,” offering APIs, SDKs, and enterprise-grade models that enable developers, BPOs, and enterprises to deploy multilingual, human-like voice agents in days instead of months.
Vaani has already been selected for the Google for Startups AI Accelerator 2025 cohort and is a part of NASSCOM’s GenAI Foundry. It has also been ranked among the Top 10 AI Infrastructure Companies globally by F6S. Additionally, Vaani is developing a new text-to-speech model that it claims will outperform existing benchmarks in terms of naturalness and emotional resonance.
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