Smallest.ai raises $8 Mn in seed funding led by Sierra Ventures

Enterprise Voice AI platform Smallest.ai has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Sierra Ventures, with participation from 3one4 Capital and Better Capital. 

The company will use the funds to expand its operations across North America and India, enhance its AI-driven voice automation stack, and deepen enterprise adoption in regulated industries such as banking, financial services, retail, healthcare, and IT.

The San Francisco and Bengaluru-based startup has also appointed Apoorv Sood as Global Head of Go-To-Market (GTM) to lead enterprise growth, partnerships, and adoption across global markets.

Founded by Sudarshan Kamath and Akshat Aandloi, Smallest.ai’s proprietary platform combines speech recognition, natural language understanding, and speech synthesis to deliver real-time, human-grade conversations. Its Lightning engine achieves 100 ms latency, while its Electron model is said to be 10x faster than leading benchmarks.

The company claims to serve enterprises such as Paytm, MakeMyTrip, ServiceNow, and Dalmia Cement, supporting multilingual capabilities with more Indian languages to be added soon.

Smallest.ai reported 300% growth in the US and 150% year-on-year growth in India, driven by rising demand for scalable voice automation. The platform helps reduce support costs by up to 80%, boosts agent productivity 10x, and ensures 24x7 availability for large organizations.

The Voice AI market is projected to reach $47.5 billion by 2034, highlighting the growing enterprise adoption of conversational AI systems globally.