Gnani.AI, which is part of the IndiaAI Mission, has raised $10 million as part of a Series B funding round from Aavishkaar Capital and existing investor Info Edge Ventures.
The company will use the funds to build agentic AI capabilities, multilingual and industry solutions, and strengthen its engineering and product teams to capture a share of the global enterprise voice AI market.
“Our mission has always been to make customer engagement more human, more secure, and more scalable through voice-first AI. Partnering with Aavishkaar Capital is a powerful validation of that vision. Their investment will help us deepen our generative AI capabilities and accelerate our global expansion,” said Gnani’s cofounders Ganesh Gopalan and Ananth Nagaraj in a statement.
The funding comes a little over a month after the company launched its voice foundation model at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February. The model has 5 billion parameters for voice-to-voice, which will be expanded to the flagship 14-billion-parameter model and later to 70 billion parameters, Gopalan added.
The company is one of the startups selected for the Mission to launch core AI models for the country. Gnani’s model delivers multilingual, real-time speech processing with advanced reasoning capabilities. The model is designed for low-latency, speech-to-speech communication and is intended for applications in customer support, education, accessibility, and public-facing systems.
Post the funding, the cofounders will continue to hold about 45 per cent of the company.
Gnani has also launched Vachana STT, an enterprise-grade Indic speech recognition model trained on over 1 million hours of voice data across 1,056 domains, alongside Vachana TTS, a foundational text-to-speech model offering human-like speech and zero-shot voice cloning across 12 Indic languages.
“Deeptech is no longer a niche — it is becoming central to solving the defining challenges of our time: agricultural resilience, financial inclusion, climate adaptation, and equitable access to services,” Shilpa Maheshwari, managing director of Aavishkaar Capital, said.
Other AI startups are raising money for expansion and developing new products. Sarvam is in talks to raise about $250–300 million from Nvidia, Accel, and HCLTech, which will value the firm at $1.2 billion. Soket will develop India’s first open-source 120 billion parameter foundation model optimised for the country’s linguistic diversity, targeting sectors such as defence, healthcare, and education. And Gan.AI will create a 70 billion parameter multilingual foundation model targeting text-to-speech capabilities.
Voice AI is expected to be the only practical interface to bring in true digital equality in India and the next big thing, according to Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani. “Just as UPI made digital payments effortless for everyone, voice-driven interfaces can remove barriers to opportunity in sectors such as agriculture, education, and others for every citizen. Literacy will no longer be a barrier,” he said in January.