Venture Catalysts, India’s leading early-stage investor and integrated incubator, today announced that it has led an $400k pre-seed funding round for Vaani AI Research, the startup pioneering the “Stripe for Voice AI” by offering a full-stack, production-grade voice agent platform. The round also drew 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.
Vaani’s co-founders – Tushar Shinde, Nitesh Tripathi, and Nitish Mishra are combining their research roots from IISc and IIT-Madras with over a decade of AI and infrastructure expertise to reimagine how we interact with digital systems. The company has been selected for the Google for Startups AI Accelerator 2025 cohort and is also an active part of NASSCOM GenAI Foundry. Standing as one of the Top 10 AI Infrastructure Companies ranked by F6S, Vaani is on a mission to build India’s most expressive, empathic text-to-speech model as well, shattering current benchmarks for naturalness and emotional resonance.
Commenting on the investment, Dr. 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.”
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.”
As businesses worldwide embrace voice as the next frontier of our digital interactions, 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. With the Conversational AI market projected to exceed $47B by 2030, Voice AI is set to capture a rapidly growing share. Vaani has already identified an addressable market gap of $150M, with India and GCC alone representing a $4B opportunity.
This strategic investment extends Venture Catalysts’ legacy of empowering deep-tech founders to transform large, underserved markets through hardware-software convergence, tapping into adjacent revenue streams via subscription, usage-based API licensing and white-label collaborations with system integrators and BPOs. By leveraging its 5,500-member strong professional community and presence across 55 cities, Venture Catalysts will work hand-in-glove with Vaani to accelerate enterprise deployments, strategic partnerships and global expansion, forging India’s leadership in the voice-first economy.
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