Tushar Shinde

Founder @VaaniHQ | Building speech models for 1B people | @iiscbangalore

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

Standing on that stage and holding that little block of trophy.. it hit me how far our tiny team has come. This felt like a full-circle moment for us.

We graduated from the @GoogleStartups AI Accelerator.

For the first time in a long time, we actually paused and looked at what we’ve been building… and what @VaaniHQ is turning into.

The truth is, most of this journey hasn’t looked like 'acceleration' at all.

It looked like whiteboards full of half-broken ideas.

It looked like making voice models work in production was so fricking hard.

Getting rejections from customers forced us to unlearn everything we thought we knew.

But since then, we’ve had some of our biggest breakthroughs in tech, in business, and in understanding what it really takes to build infrastructure that can one day carry the weight of how the world speaks to AI systems.

To our investors and partners, thank you for trusting a team that was still wiring the engine while flying the plane.

To our early customers, thank you for the calls, the feedback, the patience, the tough questions. You shaped this more than you know.

To the awesome folks at @Google, especially @farishcv, @anjolieeapen, @vania_scott, @karthik_padman thank you for stretching our thinking and backing us through this journey.

Lastly, to the @VaaniHQ team - this one is for you. Every demo that broke, every model that hallucinated, every night we pushed through… all of it led here.

Cheers,
Tushar

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

@__marmikpandya This is gonna be huge. Congratulations in the launch @__marmikpandya 🔥✨

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

@arnav_kumar @pratikpoddar Haha, true that @arnav_kumar . We have also converted our 3BHK into a makeshift garage office with full vibes. Would love to host you here sometime @VaaniHQ 🙌🏻

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

On April 12, @VaaniHQ officially completed 1 year. So this is gonna be a long one 🙃

Starting an AI startup is easier these days, but actually making it sustainable is the real work.

It actually started back in 2017. Nitesh and I were at @iiscbangalore, running experiments on borrowed compute from Cray-XC40 supercomputer, while asking very frustrating questions.. Why can't these learning models make things more natural? Why do every small library or models that actually work come from outside India? What is wrong at the deeper level?

The answer was not just data, compute, or engineering.

Existing models treat humanness as an Insta filter added to speech. But imperfection is what makes us human. And that can't be a feature. We believe that has to be a different model entirely.

That belief became Vaani.

Here's our raw startup building journey...

> Three founders.. me, @bhudev_byte, and Nitsh. Zero product. Just a shared conviction and heavy early experimentation bills. Very few know how we battled sleepless nights tinkering around infra & models, wondering if our hypothesis was even right. Managed to get our first VC term-sheet in weeks.

> To make commercial sense for the GPU bills, we started building a Voice AI platform & wrote 148,000 lines of system language code for orchestration to make the entire pipeline super-fast. A lot of things broke, and Nitish and team pulled a lot of all-nighters. Then one day, we got an email from @Google saying we're selected for their @GoogleStartups AI Accelerator program from thousands of applicants. Phewww.. some external validation.

> We launched the first pilots. They were not perfect, but they worked. And working matters more than perfect. Meanwhile, the team hand-curated, collected, and cleaned 50 Terabytes of low resource language data. God.. this was the hardest part.. not building the models, but something they will eat.

> Then we hit massive GPU blockers. But rather than being devastated, the team cracked a training regime the community worldwide thought was impossible (major announcement soon)

> We now have over $2.3M in qualified enterprise pipeline, most of it converting as I speak and we're hungry for more. Working with Fortune 100 while also enabling grassroot GSIs. The team grew to 16 amazing people.

We argued more in the last 12 months than the entire decade we knew each other before. Because the wins only make sense in that context.

A major thanks to the investors who backed the team.. not a traction when we started; especially Abhishek Sharma, @Nirmit_Parikh , Shashikant Chaudhary, Michele Barbazza, Nikhil Tripathi, Uday Sodhi KK Venkata Ejaz Ahmed Viveka Kulharia Gyanendra Singh Rohit Misra and many others.

And finally the Vaani gang, which bled for this: Chandrashekran, Nishank, Somil, Mohammad, Arjun, Shailesh, Sakshi, Ayush, Saad, @capyheer, Manav, Riya, Mr.X and others.

Year one was about proving our mettle. Year two is about distributing & scaling it to the rest of the world.

Back to building.

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

@capyheer Heeraa this means more than you know. The weight you feel is exactly what we hoped this team would carry. Year two, together!!

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

https://t.co/P2NoSLYv1g

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

In 2017, Nitesh and I had a compute window on Sahasrat, IISc's supercomputer.

We weren't supposed to be there. No grant. No project. Just two people genuinely bothered by one question.

Why does AI speech feel like it's performing humanness rather than just... being?

We didn't have an answer. We had each other and a closing window of borrowed compute.

That night didn't leave us.

Seven years later, that question is a company. 16 people. 50TB of data built by hand. $2.3M in pipeline. A training regime the community said was impossible.

And we're just getting started.

Everything we couldn't say in a pitch deck 👇

[Vaani Research Labs @VaaniHQ]

Vaani Research Labs turns 1. 🎂

→ 148,000 lines of system code written from scratch
→ 50TB of low-resource language data. Hand curated.
→ 16 people who gave everything
→ $2.3M in enterprise pipeline
→ Google Startup Accelerator. Selected from thousands.

We started with one belief: imperfection is what makes us human. That can't be a feature. It has to be a different model entirely.

Year one was proof. Year two is scale.

Back to building.

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

A few years ago, I was just trying to understand how financial systems work. Now somehow ended up being on the table where folks are deciding how they might evolve with Agentic AI.

Funny how that happens. You spend a few years building in a corner, nothing happens for a long time and suddenly everything compounds and you’re in rooms like this.

And specifically for sensitive, regulated sectors, your typical last-mile solutioning is not going to solve it - but a major leap in how companies build agents, test them on responses, actions, utterances, accesses, multi-level guardrails and somehow tangibly promise that it works in real messy scenarios.

If there’s one takeaway:
AI in finance isn’t a model problem.
It’s a reliability problem.

he question is.. are you solving for that 1% which makes the agent work in a Tier-3 city where somebody is talking to your agent in their regional dialect from a fish-market?

And I am proud that the talented folks from @VaaniHQ have already been promisingly working towards it!

P.S. We have recently onboarded a few GSI partners to make Vaani available to the larger market. If you're looking to partner with a world-class AI team, our inbox is always open :)

#Vaani #VoiceAI #Finance

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

@ShubhamTotu @VaaniHQ

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

Hiring for 3 positions | For Freshers Only

I am looking for hardworking, sincere and proactive folks with fresh energy to join our Customer Success & Strategy team at Vaani Research Labs.

You shall have really good interpersonal skills & technical aptitude. This is ideal for someone with a builder mindset and has done customer-facing work with AI systems. Internship experience is a plus.

To apply, kindly drop an email to *[email protected]* with a subject line “Customer Success Role Application” and make sure to mandatorily include the following.

1. A short blurb about you
2. ⁠A short 1-2 minute video introducing yourself and why you’re the best person for this role.
3. ⁠Your resume (Don't worry, college is not a bar)

This role is strictly for freshers, and we pay close attention to our people to nurture them throughout their careers. So you will be in the good company of super-talented folks. Check more here: https://t.co/2u9iB7BfBp

This is an on-site role in HSR, Bangalore
Joining: Immediate

#Hiring #Freshers #Vaani #AI

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

On 16th March, we’ll be setting up a camp at the @Magicball_dev AI Festival in Bangalore this weekend.

The entire @VaaniHQ team is excited for this one.
Booth, demos, and some nerdy conversations.

We’ll not be there to pitch or to sell magic. Just showing how real stuff that works and where our foundational model can take the Voice AI Space.

At Vaani, we’re deep in Voice from last 8 years. And the deeper you go, the more you realise how hard it really is. And we'd love to share, from our eyes, how this industry and technology grew firsthand.

If you're building with AI, deploying voice in your ops, dabbling around different speech models, or just curious about what the heck is going on in the AI world - come hang with us.

The happy folks at @grayscale_vc, @ElevCap, @Razorpay, @plivo and @theboundlessvc are powering this, so I am sure there's gonna be a blast too 🔥 🔥

So if you’re attending, let’s meet :)

@natashamalpani @PoorviVijay @VickyJain312 @siddharthverma @sidsverma @nikhilkapur @HamadJowher @shashank_kr @harshilmathur Nitish Mishra Nitesh Tripathi

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

The biggest impact today is when voice is used in tandem with other communication channels like WhatsApp, email, and of course, a human at the bottom of the funnel.

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

Love how the Voice AI ecosystem is growing in every aspect of life now.

It's not too long that voice ai will be the number one way to make business processes and every day life more efficient.

Kudos to @tankots @WisprFlow and team!

[Tanay Kothari @tankots]

We offered 5 people a Porsche 911 GT3 RS if they could get @WisprFlow to make a mistake

It's the fastest and most accurate AI voice dictation app that's 3x more accurate than ChatGPT, Claude, or Siri.

Today, we’re finally launching on Android. Download now: https://t.co/TJhnUhDSLv

As a part of the launch, we’re giving away 6 months of Wispr Flow Pro for free.

Like, retweet and comment ‘Wispr Flow’ to get it. Enjoy.

— Written with Wispr Flow

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

@JagritiShreya Register here:
https://t.co/HKr5JrMQ6C

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

It’s not every day you get to talk about the messy, chaotic, extremely fun world of building infrastructure and foundation models for pushing the limits of Speech AI.

I will be speaking at https://t.co/mjncoq40Cr 👾's first India event hosted by @JagritiShreya and Swati. Really looking forward to jamming with some great founders, researchers, builders, and product folks in Voice.

Come lets talk if you’re around.
Should be a fun one. Link in comments.

🗓️ Feb 28 | 6:00 PM IST | Bangalore

#VoiceAI #Vaani

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

@GurpriyaSidhu while managing 100 slack messages at once

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

It's only the top 0.06% building for the future. It's that evident and still so many people are sleeping on it, when they can be the one driving the future.

So excited for the Voice AI segment to reach the masses and experience their joy of playing with it and improving their lives one LLM at a time.

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

@saurabhyadavz another post making people doubt in themselves

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

@UghDitya love the aesthetics man!

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

@primal_brainer food engineer