Smallest.ai Raises $8M – Pushing the Frontier of Voice AI

Real enterprise impact begins when machines can speak as naturally as they are now able to think.

This belief drives Smallest.ai, which is building one of the world’s fastest and most compact speech models to power real-time, human-like voices for the enterprise. In just one year of launch, the company has turned this vision into reality.

Founded by Sudarshan Kamath and Akshat Mandloi, the company has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Sierra Ventures, months after a pre-seed led by 3one4 Capital. In just one year since launch, Smallest.ai has translated research ambition into production-ready infrastructure to bring precision in Voice AI at scale.

Reimagining Enterprise Voice from First Principles

Smallest.ai is rebuilding enterprise voice AI solutions from the ground up, making speech models smaller, faster, and more expressive. Its innovations are setting new global benchmarks for latency, cost efficiency, and naturalness, proving that the future of AI lies not only in scale but in precision.

Enterprises collectively spend more than $400 billion annually on contact centres and human capital, yet many systems still fail to capture nuance or scale efficiently. Long hold periods, dropped calls and long times to resolution plague even the most customer centric organizations. Smallest.ai addresses this challenge with a full-stack voice automation platform that combines speech recognition, language understanding, and synthesis within a single, production-ready architecture.

From Idea to Enterprise Scale in 12 Months

In just a year, Smallest.ai has achieved massive technical breakthroughs:

- Reduced Text-to-Speech (TTS) latency from approximately 2 seconds to 100 milliseconds

- Scaled from prototype to production, now powering millions of enterprise calls each month

- Advanced from robotic tone to human-like speech with pauses, emotion, and inflection

- Optimized TTS cost efficiency, lowering spend from $0.20 per minute to $0.01 per minute at scale

This combination of scientific rigor, engineering depth, and customer-led iteration defines Smallest.ai’s pace of execution.

Technology Built for Production, Not Demos

At the core of the platform is Lightning, Smallest.ai’s flagship text-to-speech model that generates 10 seconds of lifelike speech in just 100 milliseconds while running on less than 1 GB of VRAM.

Complementing it is Electron, a small language model that surpasses GPT mini on both quality and latency for real-time conversational use cases. Together, these models enable natural, human-like dialogue across industries including healthcare, retail, and financial services.

Unlike most voice AI platforms that rely on external components, Smallest.ai has built a tightly integrated conversational stack that combines Lightning/Waves for multilingual speech and Atoms for real-time agents. The system is engineered for sub-100ms performance, on-premise deployment, and enterprise-grade compliance across HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and ISO 27001.

This design makes Smallest.ai one of the few companies globally to own the entire conversational loop from waveform to response at production scale.

Smaller Models, Global Impact

As the AI community moves from monolithic architectures toward modular and efficient designs, Smallest.ai exemplifies the shift to smaller, faster, and more reliable models that can run securely at the edge.

The company’s systems are four times more cost-efficient than peers while maintaining industry-leading latency and audio quality. By enabling privacy-first, low-power deployment, Smallest.ai is proving that smaller can still be truly smarter.

Aligning with a New Frontier in AI – The 3one4 Capital View

A big leap in artificial intelligence utility will come from systems that can understand intent, interpret emotion, and respond with the cadence of human conversation will define the next era of intelligent infrastructure. Voice sits at the centre of this evolution, bridging the gap between information and interaction.

As enterprises move beyond chat and text interfaces, the ability to communicate naturally is defining usability, trust, and differentiation. This requires architectures that prioritise latency, privacy, and contextual accuracy over raw parameter count.

Smallest.ai represents this inflection point. Its integrated stack of speech recognition, language understanding, and synthesis is built for production environments where reliability, security, and speed must coexist. In this architecture, fluency is not an afterthought but a core performance metric.

This direction reflects 3one4 Capital’s broader thesis on applied AI: the shift from research breakthroughs to practical enterprise infrastructure.

Built in India, for the World

Smallest.ai represents India’s next generation of deep-tech excellence that is research-led, globally benchmarked, and operationally world-class. From compute optimisation to speech modelling, the team demonstrates that foundational AI infrastructure can be built from India for global enterprise adoption.

As the world moves toward a more conversational future, Smallest.ai is setting new standards for how technology listens, understands, and speaks.

Congratulations to Sudarshan, Akshat, and the entire Smallest.ai team on this defining milestone and the journey ahead.

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