New Delhi: Venture Catalysts, India’s leading early-stage investor and integrated incubator, has announced that it led a $400,000 pre-seed funding round for Vaani AI Research, a startup building a full-stack, production-grade voice agent platform.
The investment round also included participation from global industry leaders such as 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.
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Vaani AI Research: Building the “Stripe for Voice AI”
Founded by Tushar Shinde, Nitesh Tripathi, and Nitish Mishra, Vaani AI Research merges academic expertise from IISc and IIT-Madras with deep AI and infrastructure experience.
The startup has been selected for the Google for Startups AI Accelerator 2025 and is also part of NASSCOM GenAI Foundry. It was recognized as one of the Top 10 AI Infrastructure Companies by F6S.
The company is on a mission to build India’s most expressive and empathic text-to-speech model, setting new benchmarks for natural and emotionally resonant voice technology.
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Strategic Backing for Voice-First Innovation
Commenting on the funding, 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.”
Addressing the Global Conversational AI Market
With the conversational AI market projected to surpass $47 billion by 2030, Vaani AI Research is focused on an identified $150 million market gap, with India and GCC together representing a $4 billion opportunity.
The company’s APIs, SDKs, multilingual ASR/TTS models, and deployment flexibility (Cloud and On-Prem) enable enterprises to deploy human-like, compliant voice agents quickly.
Venture Catalysts’ Role in Scaling Vaani AI Research
This investment reflects Venture Catalysts’ strategy of backing deep-tech founders addressing large markets through hardware-software convergence.
Leveraging its 5,500-member network and presence across 55 cities, Venture Catalysts will collaborate with Vaani AI Research to accelerate enterprise adoption, build global partnerships, and strengthen India’s position in the growing voice-first economy.
