Every second of wait time costs money.
In contact centers, customers wait. Agents burn out. Companies bleed revenue trying to scale human teams across time zones and languages. It’s a game of diminishing returns.
Smallest.ai is changing the math.
Founded by Sudarshan Kamath (IIT Guwahati, ex-Bosch AI) and Akshat Mandloi (ex-Bosch autonomous systems), Smallest.ai builds ultra-low-latency voice AI agents for real-time, multilingual conversations at enterprise scale.
This isn’t just another chatbot with a voice layer. The core of Smallest.ai is “Lightning” — their text-to-speech model that’s built for speed and quality at a level that makes AI conversations feel human.
The market? Contact centers globally that need to automate without sacrificing the human touch.
The insight came from the trenches. Both founders spent years at Bosch building AI perception systems for Level 3 self-driving cars — where milliseconds matter and failure isn’t an option. They brought that same obsession with latency and reliability to voice AI.
Fresh off an $8M seed round led by Sierra Ventures (with 3one4 Capital and Better Capital), Smallest.ai now operates out of San Francisco and Bengaluru, serving enterprise clients in banking, healthcare, and retail.
It’s a classic example of autonomous vehicle DNA finding an unexpected home in customer experience.
We can’t wait to see the Smallest.ai team at the AIBoomi Annual in March.
Let’s celebrate the builders.
w/ Jay Ingle & Dikshant Joshi
