Smallest.ai raises $13M to build ultra-fast voice AI that sounds genuinely human

Smallest.ai, a startup founded in late 2024, has raised $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Seligman Ventures to develop ultra-fast voice AI agents that sound genuinely human. The company focuses on building small, specialized voice models that mimic human conversation by listening, thinking, and speaking simultaneously, thereby eliminating the unnatural response lags typical of large language models. While the real-time voice model handles natural interactions and diverse accents, it can seamlessly hand off complex queries to offline foundation models when needed. Serving enterprise clients such as RingCentral and Truecaller, Smallest.ai aims to break the Turing test by making AI-driven voice conversations indistinguishable from human speech.

(Source：TechCrunch)