Vaani AI Research raises $400K pre-seed round led by Venture Catalysts

Vaani AI Research, a deeptech startup building full-stack, production-grade voice agent infrastructure, has raised $400,000 in a pre-seed round led by Venture Catalysts. 

The round also saw participation from global operators and domain leaders including Dr. Abhishek Sharma (Meta SuperIntelligence, ex-Apple), Dr. Viveka Kulharia (MoonValley), Shashikant Chaudhary (ex-MD, GlobalLogic), Ejaz Ahmed (Meta Reality Labs), Nikhil Tripathi (Bijak), Uday Sodhi (ex-Sony Pictures India), KK Venkata (Oliver Wyman), Swapnil Sheth (IndigoEdge), Michele Barbazza (VAT Group, Switzerland) and others.

The proceeds will be used to scale its voice stack, deepen R&D, and expand enterprise partnerships across India, the GCC, and global markets. 

Founded in 2024 by Tushar Shinde, Nitesh Tripathi, and Nitish Mishra, the startup combines its research DNA from IISc and IIT-Madras with over a decade of AI and infrastructure expertise. Vaani is building what it calls the “Stripe for Voice AI” — delivering APIs, SDKs, and enterprise-grade models that allow developers, BPOs, and enterprises to deploy human-like, multilingual voice agents in days instead of months.

The firm claims to have already been selected for the Google for Startups AI Accelerator 2025 cohort and is part of NASSCOM’s GenAI Foundry. It has also been ranked among the Top 10 AI Infrastructure Companies globally by F6S. Vaani is further developing text-to-speech (TTS) model, designed to surpass current benchmarks in naturalness and emotional resonance.