Vaani AI Research, a deeptech startup building full-stack, production-grade voice agent infrastructure, has raised $400,000 in its pre-seed funding round led by Venture Catalysts, an early-stage investor and integrated incubator.
The round also saw participation from Dr. Abhishek Sharma of Meta’s SuperIntelligence team and Apple, Dr. Viveka Kulharia of MoonValley, Shashikant Chaudhary, former MD of GlobalLogic, Ejaz Ahmed of Meta Reality Labs, Nikhil Tripathi of Bijak, Uday Sodhi, former Business Head at Sony Pictures India, KK Venkata of Oliver Wyman, Swapnil Sheth of IndigoEdge, Michele Barbazza of VAT Group, Switzerland and many others.
Founded in 2024 by Tushar Shinde, Nitesh Tripathi, and Nitish Mishra, Vaani AI Research is building “Stripe for Voice AI” by offering a full-stack, production-grade voice agent platform.
Vaani’s low-latency APIs, SDKs, multilingual ASR/TTS models and flexible deployment options (Cloud, On-prem) deliver human-like, compliant voice agents in days, not months, addressing real-world pain points of latency, scalability, complexity and moving beyond just good-looking pilots.
Tushar Shinde, Co-Founder and CEO of Vaani AI Research, said, “At Vaani, we believe voice is the next inevitable interface and a much richer form of digital communications. Just like how Stripe simplified payments and Snowflake redefined data infrastructure, Vaani is building the rails for production-grade Voice AI. With this funding, we aim to scale our voice stack, deepen our models and IP, and partner with enterprises who are ready to move beyond fragile demos into real-world deployments. Our vision is simple: to make every business, app, and service on the planet speak as naturally as we humans do.”
Apoorva Ranjan Sharma from Venture Catalysts said, “We’re living in an automation-first era. Moving from brittle chatbots to robust, voice-driven interfaces is not just an upgrade; it’s a paradigm shift. Vaani’s platform unifies infrastructure and intelligence, empowering enterprises, developers and BPOs to deploy scalable, empathic voice agents at production scale. This investment underscores our conviction that voice will redefine customer engagement, from call centers to in-car assistants to voice-first app interfaces. Vaani’s best-in-class IP and flexible business model will position India at the forefront of global Voice AI innovation.”
