The Albany Gazette - Smallest.ai Raises $8M Seed to Redefine Enterprise Voice AI

The raise positions Smallest.ai to accelerate its vision of making fast, multilingual, and production-ready AI agents the new standard for enterprise communication. The company is first bringing this vision to contact centers - an industry where enterprises collectively spend over $400 billion annually on human capital, yet still face spiraling costs and customer dissatisfaction.

Despite billions invested in AI, enterprises still struggle with voice automation. Deloitte notes that in a survey, 53% of participating companies expect their total contact volume to increase over the next 5 years. As call volumes surge, the limitations of human-only teams and legacy tools become even more apparent, making scalable voice automation not just a cost lever, but a necessity for delivering consistent customer experience

The problem remains that contact centers remain plagued by long wait times, inconsistent quality, and systems that fail to capture nuance - costing businesses billions each year.

Smallest.ai addresses this gap with voice AI that matches human-level speed, accuracy, and emotional intelligence, designed specifically for enterprise scale.

These multi-modal AI agents are built specifically for high-volume contact centers, automating customer support, pre-sales, and collections across multiple languages. By owning both the model and application layers of the stack, the company delivers enterprise-grade speed, quality, and cost control in one integrated platform.

"Voice is the most natural way humans connect, yet enterprises are stuck with outdated tools that frustrate customers and overburden agents," said Sudarshan Kamath, Founder of Smallest.ai. "Our mission is simple: make speaking to AI as effortless and reliable as speaking to another person. We believe every enterprise interaction can be faster, more empathetic, and more human-like."

At the heart of Smallest.ai's platform are proprietary, production-ready models designed for enterprise scale. Its Lightning text-to-speech engine achieves ≈100 ms latency, making it 5-6x faster than leading systems, while its Electron language model delivers a 10x faster time-to-first-byte than GPT-4.1 Mini with comparable accuracy. Lightning ASR replaces legacy systems with superior cost-to-quality performance for North American and European languages.

Unlike most platforms that stitch together third-party providers, Smallest.ai owns the entire voice AI stack covering speech recognition, language understanding, and speech synthesis. This enables enterprises to deploy agents fully on-premise for maximum security and compliance, while maintaining granular cost control.

The system is also built for vertical customization: enterprises can launch agents tailored to finance, healthcare, retail, and IT, drawing from pre-built templates and fine-tuned models. This allows organizations to deploy production-ready voice agents in days rather than months, with accuracy, guardrails, and natural expressiveness tuned to industry-specific needs.

Together, these models are now being combined into a speech-to-speech architecture that brings better emotional control, lower latencies, and easier orchestration than current state-of-the-art solutions.

Enterprises are already seeing the impact. In banking and financial services across the US and India, millions of call minutes each month run on Smallest.ai's platform. The company is now expanding into retail, healthcare, and IT, the industries where demand for reliable, scalable voice automation continues to grow.

"Our in-house models aren't just about speed-they're about enterprise reliability," said Akshat Mandloi, Co-founder and CTO of Smallest.ai. "We've engineered natural speech understanding, guardrails, and expressiveness into a single coherent stack. That means enterprises can launch agents in days, not months - without worrying about hallucinations or integration headaches."

The founders bring a rare combination of research depth and enterprise execution. Sudarshan and Akshat have built and scaled AI systems across electric vehicles, drones, autonomous platforms, and their obsession with practical, production-ready AI - not just demos - has positioned Smallest.ai as one of the fastest-emerging players in enterprise AI.

"Voice is emerging as the next frontier in enterprise AI, and Smallest has built one of the most exciting platforms we've seen," said Ashish Kakran, Partner at Sierra Ventures. "Sudarshan and Akshat are customer-obsessed technical founders who understand what enterprises truly need…agents that are fast, secure, and production-ready."

Looking ahead, Smallest.ai aims to push the boundaries of speech-to-speech systems, expand global deployments, and move closer to a future where billions of people speak to AI every single day.

About Smallest.ai

Smallest.ai is an enterprise Voice AI platform headquartered in San Francisco, building voice agents optimized for quality, latency, and privacy. Its in-house Lightning model and ecosystem enable enterprises to automate millions of interactions across domains like support, debt collection, and pre-sales. The platform supports 100+ voices, dozens of languages, and integrates seamlessly with CRMs, telephony, messaging, and email systems. For more, visit smallest.ai.

Media Contact: Nina Pfister, MAG PR at [email protected]

SOURCE: Smallest.ai

View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire

(Y.Harris--TAG)