Enterprise Voice AI platform Smallest.ai has raised $8 million in a seed funding round led by Sierra Ventures, with participation from 3one4 Capital and Better Capital. The company will use the capital to expand its presence across North America and India, accelerate product development, and deepen adoption in regulated sectors including banking, financial services, retail, healthcare, and IT.
With offices in San Francisco and Bengaluru, the startup has also appointed Apoorv Sood as Global Head of Go-To-Market to lead enterprise growth and partnerships worldwide.
Founded by Sudarshan Kamath and Akshat Mandloi, Smallest.ai provides on-premise and hybrid Voice AI solutions designed to meet compliance and data privacy requirements in sectors where reliability and uptime are critical. The platform is built for large-scale deployments with high observability and failover support.
At its core is a proprietary full-stack Voice AI system that combines speech recognition, natural language understanding, and speech synthesis for real-time conversations. The company says its Lightning engine achieves 100 ms latency and that its Electron model can generate responses 10 times faster than leading global benchmarks.
The platform is currently used by enterprises such as Paytm, MakeMyTrip, ServiceNow, and Dalmia Cement, with support for more Indian languages in development.
“We’ve built Smallest.ai for scale, reliability, and trust, especially for regulated industries,” said founder and CEO Sudarshan Kamath. “This capital gives us the push to take that vision global with the same enterprise discipline we started with.”
Ashish Kakran, Partner at Sierra Ventures, said the firm invested because the company is addressing the challenge of delivering real-time, human-grade voice interactions at scale. He said the company’s approach reflects how innovation from India can scale to global markets.
Sood said voice is becoming a primary interface for enterprise engagement and that the company will focus on scaling globally while driving impact across teams and customer interactions.
The company expects 300 percent growth in the United States and 150 percent year-on-year growth in India over the next year, citing rising adoption of AI-led voice automation. It also claims that its platform can reduce enterprise support costs by up to 80 percent and deliver multi-million dollar annual savings for large organisations.
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