Smallest.ai to use $8 million seed funding to train multimodal AI model ‘Hydra’ and expand in India, US

Full-stack enterprise voice AI platform Smallest.ai plans to channel its freshly raised $8 million seed funding into building its next-generation multimodal model, ‘Hydra’, and expanding its presence across India and the United States. The round was led by Sierra Ventures, with participation from 3one4 Capital and Better Capital.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Sudarshan Kamath, Founder and CEO of Smallest.ai, said the company will direct half of the funds towards research and model development. “We are releasing a model called Hydra. It is a multimodal speech-and-text-in, speech-and-text-out model that’s going to be full duplex and work in real time. Half of this capital will go into training Hydra and making sure it’s robust enough for enterprise use cases,” he said.

The other half of the funding will support Smallest.ai’s go-to-market expansion across India and North America. “We’ve had great customer success initially, but we are still a very small company—just 30 people—so we’re going to focus on ensuring we have the resources that some of the larger companies have,” Kamath added.

Founded in 2023, Smallest.ai builds full-stack voice AI solutions for large enterprises to automate customer engagement through natural, human-like conversations. The company counts Paytm, MakeMyTrip, and ServiceNow among its clients.

Kamath said the company is taking a “contrarian approach” by focusing on small language models (SLMs) instead of large language models (LLMs) to achieve efficient intelligence for enterprise use cases. Smallest.ai is also working closely with OpenAI to explore collaboration between their respective systems in a multi-agent framework.

The startup aims to strengthen its research-led foundation, enhance enterprise-grade reliability, and build AI infrastructure capable of powering voice-based interactions at scale. “Our vision is to be the layer of infrastructure that enables a billion people to talk to AI every single day through voice,” Kamath said.

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