Funding · AI & Deep Tech

Smallest.ai launches voice AI platform with small models for faster, natural conversations

By Startup Enthusiast · 24 January 2026

Date: 24 January 2026
Company: Smallest.ai
What it does: Voice AI platform for enterprises
Kind: Funding
Amount: $8 Mn
Stage: seed
Founded: 2023
Sector: AI & Deep Tech

What they do

Smallest.ai builds voice AI systems using small models to improve speed and responsiveness in real-time conversations

What happened

The startup launched in 2023 and has developed multiple versions of its speech stack, including text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and speech-to-speech pipelines

Why it matters

The company targets banking and financial services first, where voice is a more natural modality than text for customer interactions

The details

Smallest.ai is a voice AI platform that uses small models to improve the speed and responsiveness of real-time conversations.
The startup was founded in 2023 by Akshat Mandloi and Sudarshan Kamath, who previously worked on AI systems in production for nearly a decade.
The company's focus is on building voice AI systems that are optimized for conversational use cases, rather than content creation.
Smallest.ai's technology is almost entirely proprietary, with models trained from scratch and tuned for specific architectural layers.
The startup has developed multiple versions of its speech stack, including text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and speech-to-speech pipelines.
The system supports emotional context, breathing patterns, and multilingual output across English, Spanish, major European languages, and top Indian languages.
Smallest.ai's technology is designed to be cloud-agnostic, allowing deployment on customer infrastructure for added security.
The company has secured clients in the banking and financial services sector in India and the US.

The bigger picture

Voice AI is becoming a core interface for India's digital economy, which is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030.
Smallest.ai addresses the gap in real-time conversational AI, where latency and responsiveness are critical.
The startup's focus on small models offers faster processing, lower costs, and reduced memory usage compared to large language models.
The company's approach to infrastructure allows deployment across different platforms, making it attractive to regulated enterprises.

About the business

Smallest.ai provides a voice AI platform that includes text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and speech-to-speech pipelines.
The platform is designed for enterprise use, with support for real-time conversations and multilingual output.
The company's technology is optimized for conversational use cases, making it suitable for industries like banking and financial services.
Smallest.ai's models are trained from scratch and heavily tuned for specific architectural layers to improve speed and conversational flow.
The startup's system is cloud-agnostic, allowing deployment on customer infrastructure for added security.

What happens next

The company aims to build trust with regulated enterprises by offering flexible deployment options.

The deal

Type: launch

Founders

Akshat Mandloi, co-founder
Sudarshan Kamath, co-founder

About Smallest.ai

Product: Voice AI software for real-time speech recognition, understanding and synthesis.
Customers: Enterprises in financial services, healthcare, contact centres and BPO.
How it makes money: B2B software platform sold to enterprise customers.
What sets it apart: Low-latency voice stack with proprietary Hydra architecture.
Operations: Operates from San Francisco and Bengaluru, with customers across North America and India.

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