Vaani AI Research raises $400K in pre-seed round

Deeptech startup Vaani AI Research has raised $400,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Venture Catalysts. 

Other investors including Dr Abhishek Sharma (Meta SuperIntelligence and Apple), Dr Viveka Kulharia (MoonValley), Shashikant Chaudhary (former MD, GlobalLogic), Ejaz Ahmed (Meta Reality Labs), Nikhil Tripathi (Bijak), Uday Sodhi (former Business Head, Sony Pictures India), KK Venkata (Oliver Wyman), Swapnil Sheth (IndigoEdge), Michele Barbazza (VAT Group, Switzerland), among others, also participated in this round.

The funds will help the company grow its voice technology, boost research and development, and expand enterprise partnerships in India, the GCC, and worldwide.

Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma of Venture Catalysts said, “Vaani’s platform unifies infrastructure and intelligence, enabling enterprises, developers, and BPOs to deploy scalable, empathic voice agents. Moving from brittle chatbots to robust voice interfaces represents a paradigm shift in automation.”

CEO and Co-Founder Tushar Shinde emphasized, “Voice is the next inevitable interface. Vaani AI Research is building the infrastructure rails for Voice AI, much like Stripe simplified payments. This funding will accelerate our voice stack, IP development, and enterprise partnerships.”

About Vaani AI Research

Founded in 2024 by Tushar Shinde, Nitesh Tripathi and Nitish Mishra, Vaani AI Research combines expertise from IISc and IIT-Madras with strong AI and infrastructure experience. 

Selected for google for Startups AI Accelerator 2025 and NASSCOM GenAI Foundry, it was also named a Top 10 AI Infrastructure Company by F6S. 

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The startup aims to create india’s most natural and expressive text to speech voices, setting new standards in emotional and human-like speech technology.

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