Smallest AI in talks to raise $10-15 million at $50-60 million valuation

Smallest.ai, an AI startup working in voice model, is looking to raise $10-15 million at a valuation of $50-60 million, three sources aware of the development told ET.

The company is in talks with its existing investors such as 3one4 Capital and Better Capital and other investors in the US and India for this round, according to the sources in the know. According to a source, close to 50% of the funding will go into research, training data and infrastructure needs.

The company was founded by Sudarshan Kamath and Akshat Mandloi in 2023. It raised seed funding from Upsparks Capital, 3one4 Capital and Better Capital last year.


While the company is headquartered in San Francisco, the large portion of its team sits out of India.

Kamath, in a statement, told ET, “We always have the backing of existing investors if needed and we are not short on funds at the moment.” He added that that focus is on growing profitably and a large part of their capital has always been reserved for research, model training and related infra.

Apart from Sarvam and Krutrim that are building foundational models, there are only a handful of GenAI companies building in India that have raised more than $10 million in capital, according to data from Tracxn. This includes Nurix, Neysa, Spotdraft, Contlo and Senseforth.

The firm launched their text-to-speech model, Lightning, that can generate 10 seconds of audio in 100 milliseconds, at a cost of $0.04 per minute. The model currently supports English and Hindi, and this will be extended to other Indian languages in the coming weeks, the company had announced at the time of launch in October 2024.

The company also offers two other products, Waves, which generates voice across languages, and Atoms, a conversational AI agent.