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Sierra Ventures leads $8 million seed funding round in Smallest.ai
Smallest.ai supports on-premise and hybrid deployments, ensuring data privacy, compliance, and reliability critical for BFSI and other regulated industries.
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The investment will fuel the company’s global expansion across North America and India. Image: Pixabay | representational
Written By: ZeeBiz WebTeam
Updated: Wed, Oct 29, 2025
05:55 PM IST
05:55 PM IST
New Delhi, ZeeBiz WebDesk
Full-stack enterprise Voice AI platform Smallest.ai has received $8 million in seed funding, the company said in a statement today, October 28. The round was led by Sierra Ventures, in which 3one4 Capital and Better Capital also participated.
The investment will fuel the company’s global expansion across North America and India, accelerate product innovation, and deepen enterprise penetration in regulated sectors such as banking, financial services, retail, healthcare, and IT, the company said.
At the same time, Apoorv Sood has also joined as global head of go-to-market (GTM) to lead enterprise growth and partnerships worldwide.
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"Built with roots in India and a clear focus on both the US and Indian markets, the team is demonstrating how world-class innovation can come out of India and serve global customers. We’re excited to support this next chapter — enabling voice to become a first-class interface in enterprise engagement across continents," said Ashish Kakran, Partner at Sierra Ventures.
Also Read: Deeptech startup HYDGEN raises $5 million led by Transition VC
Smallest.ai was founded by Sudarshan Kamath and Akshat Mandloi. It supports on-premise and hybrid deployments, ensuring data privacy, compliance, and reliability critical for BFSI and other regulated industries. The company’s architecture is designed for massive scalability, observability, and failover reliability, delivering consistent uptime and performance across millions of customer interactions.
“Voice is becoming the new interface for enterprise engagement. Our focus is on scaling this globally while building meaningful impact for teams, customers, and partners. It’s about using AI to make communication faster, smarter, and more human,” said Apoorv Sood, Global Head of Go-To-Market, Smallest.ai.
At its core, Smallest.ai’s proprietary full-stack Voice AI combines speech recognition, natural language understanding, and speech synthesis to enable real-time, human-grade conversations. Its Lightning engine achieves 100 ms latency, and the Electron model delivers 10x faster responses than leading global benchmarks, while maintaining enterprise-grade accuracy and security. The platform already powers thousands of monthly call minutes for leading enterprises including Paytm, MakeMyTrip, ServiceNow, and Dalmia Cement, with support for English, Hindi, Spanish, and more Indian languages coming soon.
In the startup space, this week, deeptech startup HYDGEN also raised $5 million led by Transition VC.
Another startup in the fintech space, Optimo Capital, has received Rs 150 crore in the Series A round.
Also Read: Fintech firm Optimo Capital raises Rs 150 crore in Series A round
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