Mumbai: Maya Research, an AI startup focused on building conversational voice interfaces for emerging markets, has raised $1.9 million in a seed funding round led by South Park Commons, as it looks to accelerate the development of multilingual voice intelligence designed for billions of users globally.
Founded in 2025 by BS Dheemanth Reddy and Bharath Kumar Kakumani, Maya Research is building AI systems centred on natural voice interactions rather than traditional text-based interfaces. The company’s approach is based on the belief that the next wave of AI adoption will be driven by spoken interactions across local languages and contexts.
Maya’s conversational models are designed to speak, interpret and respond like native speakers while adapting to regional languages, cultural nuances and everyday communication patterns.
Commenting on the milestone, Dheemanth Reddy, Co-founder and CEO of Maya Research, said, “India is not a text economy, it never was. While the conversation around AI sovereignty has focused on large language models and text interfaces, the more urgent question is: whose voice models are Indians talking to? Right now, that answer is almost entirely foreign. Maya exists to change that. We built our models frugally, on cloud credits, because we believed the problem was worth solving regardless of resources. And what we have built is already on the leaderboard. For the next five billion people, voice is not a feature. It is how they live. They will access AI through an interface that can hold a real conversation with them and understand them. That is what we are building. We want that experience to be built in India, owned in India, and available to the world from India.”
Since its launch, the company has recorded more than 440,000 model downloads on Hugging Face, crossed 3 million app downloads across India, Southeast Asia and MENA, and emerged as the only Indian company represented on Speech Arena.
Its flagship open-source emotive voice model, Maya 1, released under Apache 2.0, currently holds a Quality Elo score of 1,051 on Speech Arena, ranking sixth among open-weight voice models globally and positioning it alongside some of the leading conversational AI systems.
Maya said its consumer application creates a continuous feedback loop of speech data and interactions, enabling faster model improvement and ongoing performance enhancements.
Speaking about the company’s product philosophy, Bharath Kumar Kakumani, Co-founder and CTO of Maya Research, said, “Technology should feel magical to people. It should feel like something that belongs to them, not something foreign they have to learn. For too long, technology has alienated the majority of the world because it was never built for how they speak, think, or live. We are building models that talk like one of them, understand like one of them, and feel local from the first interaction. When technology feels native, real adoption happens.”
Backing the investment, Prateek Mehta, General Partner at South Park Commons, said, “The internet was built around English and text, which quietly left most of the world outside the interface. Maya is rebuilding that interface around how people actually communicate: by speaking, in their own language. As voice becomes the way billions of people interact with technology, the company with the richest multilingual speech data and the strongest conversational models will have a defining advantage. Maya has already shown strong early proof, with over 3 million app downloads and more than 440,000 model downloads on Hugging Face.”
Aditya Agarwal, General Partner at South Park Commons, added, “AI for India will require re-imagining both the input modalities and the interfaces through which our population will access this life-changing technology. Maya is India’s ChatGPT moment.”
As voice AI evolves beyond transcription, translation and speech generation, Maya Research is targeting a broader opportunity in conversational intelligence—developing systems capable of listening, understanding and responding with greater contextual and human-like interaction.
With fresh capital and growing adoption across markets, the company plans to continue expanding its capabilities in multilingual voice AI while strengthening India’s position in the global AI ecosystem.
