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Kamath: Cartesia is the only other player focused on real-time voice
“Right now, the only other player who's focused on real time is Cartesia.”
Kamath: Smallest AI has enough capital to reach $100M ARR
“Having said that, I still think the capital we have right now is enough to build a hundred million ARR company.”
Kamath: Voice AI will diverge and is definitely not winner-takes-all
“I think the markets will diverge at some point of time. Like so for example, 11 is sort of doubling down on the content space but the real time space, like mimicking how humans do conversations is, it's like a very different problem than mimicking how movies a…”
Kamath: Indian language AI is an operational dataset problem, not scientific
“Indian languages for me was like just an operational problem to solve getting data sets, et cetera. But it was not a scientific enough problem that helps us answer what's like the next level of AI and that how can small models be the future, et cetera.”
Kamath: Only ~20 Indian companies can offer seven-figure enterprise deals
“There are probably 20 companies in India who can give us that kind of a deal size and they would spend an incredible amount of time and effort.”
Kamath: ElevenLabs is focused on content creation and dubbing, not real-time
“Like for example, 11 has a lot of focus on content creation and like dubbing. And if you want to build like an Instagram video or like a AI movie 11 would be a great player. We don't focus on content at all. We are focused on the real time space.”
Kamath: Smallest AI's Pulse speech-to-text operates at 64ms latency
“So we have this amazing voice model that converts voice to text called pulse. It's a speech to text model runs in real time 64 milliseconds latency lot of other features like emotion detection, gender detection, bunch of other things, right?”
Kamath: Smallest AI reduced 3one4 Capital's $1M check to prevent dilution
“We asked them to reduce the check size. We said, we can't take one at six. It's like too much dilution for us. So we, I think we ended up at like some 500 or six or something.”
Kamath: Smallest AI built sub-200ms real-time TTS before ElevenLabs
“11 Labs was completely into offline dubbing and things like that. They did not have a real time model, right? So we were one of the first people to build a real time text-to-speech that ran under 200 milliseconds.”
Kamath: Cartesia relies on state space models, Smallest AI does not
“But they are heavily dependent on state space models and we don't train state space models.”
Kamath: AI research hires take six months to show ROI
“Research gives you ROI in like six months. So you can't like hire someone right now and then expect, if you have goals for 2026, like in September, you have to get those people right now.”
Kamath: Indian financial firm runs 100K+ daily debt calls on Smallest AI
“There is a financial services company based in India, which is doing large scale debt collections using us, like, you know, every day we are like at a 100,000 calls plus using that.”
Kamath: Smallest AI signed a seven-figure US telecommunications enterprise deal
“It is converted to a seven figure multi-year multimillion deal. But we will announce it formally sometime like in April or so once we sort of clear a few things, but yeah, it is that like all of those things are in paper right now.”
Kamath: Smallest AI received an acquisition offer over $150M
“We got in between like an acquisition offer for like one 50 plus million dollars.”
Sierra Ventures issued Smallest AI a term sheet within one to two weeks
“From the time he was like, quote unquote, ready to raise to writing the, to giving him a term sheet. I mean, it was maybe a week, couple of weeks, something like that.”
Kamath: Founder bootstrapped Smallest AI with $150K of his own money
“I put the first 101 50 K into smallest of my own. And we basically got like some GPUs and we started like training models.”
Kamath: Smallest AI writes custom GPU kernels for NVIDIA hardware
“And we go right to the level of The NVIDIA architecture to even write our own kernels. So we are not scared of touching any part of the stack.”
Kamath: Smallest AI raised $900K extension, totaling $1.8M
“We raised another 900 K extension at a higher valuation. And we had like 1.8 of which most of it was in the bank.”
Kamath: US telephony firm records internal meetings with Smallest AI
“There is a telephony company that has all of their like meetings internal meetings, getting like recorded in the US using our voice models.”
Kamath: Smallest AI closed Series A round with Seligman Ventures
“We closed the series A, we could call it a pre-series A, but like we closed with the Seligman Ventures.”
Kamath: Smallest AI is working with ServiceNow
“For example service now, for example, Right. We are working with them.”
Kamath: Smallest AI raised initial pre-seed checks at a $3M valuation
“Upsparks was like, not much like a hundred K if I am not wrong. Better was another two 50 or so. The total round was three 50 K and then couple of angels of 400 or something like that. This is at like a three million post money sort of around, right?”
Kamath: Smallest AI is building a predictive architecture for voice
“We are trying to build like a predictive view of voice and like conversations that we can have so that you can guess what the answer should be rather than How LLMs typically operate.”
Kamath: AWS is an active reseller of Smallest AI
“AWS is an active reseller of smallest by the way.”
Kamath: Smallest AI cut TTS latency to sub-100ms by seed round
“So we had a text to speech model which basically you could use to give natural realistic voice to the voice agent in under a hundred milliseconds. So initially it was at 200 milliseconds. It came down to a hundred milliseconds by the time our seed round was th…”
Kamath: Smallest AI targets top 50 accounts via Palantir-style sales
“We are literally creating the like list of top 50 dream customers that we have and going aggressively through like a top down motion, a very targeted motion of how could we, you know, get them through a Palantir style approach.”