Bengaluru-based Conversational AI Startup Gnani AI Raises $4 mn

GenAI startup Gnani AI, which is India’s first voice-first SLM for vernacular languages, recently raised $4 mn from tech holding company Info Edge. The investment will help lead the startup’s expansion plans. 

“What we’re doing is something different, like a fusion of voice and text models. It’s a multimodal model but right now we are focused on voice and text,” said Ganesh Gopalan, CEO of Gnani.ai, in an earlier exclusive interaction with AIM. 

Indic Language Training Datasets 

The startup that is building a series of voice-based small language models has been training on millions of hours of proprietary audio datasets and billions of conversations in Indic languages. In India, their model supports 12 Indian languages. In the US, English and Spanish languages are provided. 

Gnani AI have built a series of five models suitable for banking, finance, security and insurance domains. 

Running their AI models on the edge, Gopalan believes this method will help bring down costs. THe startup also specialises in quickly fine tuning models based on enterprise needs. 

“It’s one thing to have an SLM for the BFSI sector, but the real value to a company is when you have a model built just for their data. So that’s what we do. We take our model to enterprises and help them build on top of it,” said Gopalan. 

Interestingly, there are a number of emerging genAI startups in India that are exclusively working for finance customers. Recently, OnFinance, a genAI startup, is building proprietary LLMs for BFSI customers. They also became the first genAI startup to have NSE (National Stock Exchange of India) as their client.