US-based Smallest.ai bags $8m to expand across North America, India
- ByStartupStory | October 28, 2025
Smallest.ai, a cutting-edge enterprise voice AI startup, has raised $8 million in a seed funding round led by Sierra Ventures, with participation from India’s 3one4 Capital and Better Capital. The fresh capital injection will fuel the company’s dual-market expansion plans across North America and India while accelerating product innovation and enterprise adoption in regulated sectors like banking, healthcare, retail, and IT.
Pioneering Voice AI for Enterprises
Founded in 2023 by CEO Sudarshan Kamath and Co-founder Akshat Mandloi, Smallest.ai is building a proprietary “full-stack” voice AI platform. It uniquely combines speech recognition, natural language understanding, and speech synthesis to enable real-time, human-grade voice conversations across complex enterprise use cases such as customer support automation, debt collection, and lead qualification.
Smallest.ai’s advanced Lightning engine boasts ultra-low latency of 100 milliseconds, while its “Electron” voice model operates ten times faster than industry benchmarks. The company’s platform supports over 100 voices and multiple languages, including English, Hindi, and Spanish, with plans to add more Indian languages soon.
Growing Customer Base and Market Demand
Clients include prominent enterprises such as Paytm, MakeMyTrip, ServiceNow, and Dalmia Cement. Smallest.ai claims its technology can reduce support costs by up to 80%, boost agent productivity tenfold, and assure 24/7 availability across voice channels.
Market trends reflect robust demand growth for scalable, natural voice AI solutions, with Smallest.ai projecting 300% growth in the US market and 150% year-on-year growth in India within the next 12 months.
Strategic Use of Funds and Leadership Expansion
The $8 million will be divvied equally between product research and development—specifically training their next-generation multimodal AI model “Hydra”—and scaling go-to-market operations in target geographies.
To spearhead global enterprise partnerships, Smallest.ai recently appointed Apoorv Sood as Global Head of Go-To-Market. Sood brings rich expertise in scaling enterprise technology ventures and accelerating customer adoption.
Vision for Voice AI Democratization
“We have built Smallest.ai for scale, reliability, and trust—especially for regulated industries,” says Sudarshan Kamath. “This capital gives us the push to take that vision global with the same enterprise discipline we started with.”
Smallest.ai takes a contrarian approach by focusing on small language models (SLMs) instead of large-scale alternatives, aiming to provide efficient, domain-specialized intelligence suitable for real-time voice applications in large enterprises.
Conclusion
Smallest.ai’s seed funding round positions the startup to strengthen its research leadership in voice and multimodal AI, broaden its geographic footprint, and deepen enterprise penetration. As voice AI accelerates as a strategic tool for customer engagement and operational efficiency, Smallest.ai is well-placed to enable enterprises globally to converse with AI naturally and seamlessly, powering a billion conversations daily.
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