Maya Research raises $1.9 Mn in seed round led by South Park Commons
Maya Research develops multilingual, voice-first AI models designed for users who interact with technology through conversation rather than text, with a focus on local languages and regional contexts.
AI startup Maya Research has raised $1.9 million in a seed funding round led by South Park Commons.
The funding comes as demand for multilingual and voice-first AI technologies continues to grow, with startups increasingly building solutions tailored to users who rely on spoken interactions rather than traditional text-based interfaces.
Founded in 2025 by BS Dheemanth Reddy and Bharath Kumar Kakumani, Maya Research is developing AI-powered voice interfaces for users who interact with technology through conversation instead of text. Its models are designed to understand and respond in local languages while adapting to regional contexts and conversational nuances.
The startup’s open-source voice model, Maya 1, has been released under the Apache 2.0 licence and currently ranks sixth globally among open-weight voice models on Speech Arena, with a Quality Elo score of 1,051. According to the company, it is the only Indian startup featured on the platform’s leaderboard.
Maya Research said its models have crossed 440,000 downloads on Hugging Face, while its consumer application has recorded more than 3 million downloads across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The company added that the consumer app helps generate high-quality conversational data, enabling it to continuously improve its AI models.