Cartesia Expands Operations to India
San Francisco-based enterprise Cartesia, a pioneer in real-time voice AI solutions, is set to establish a presence in India.
“Following the introduction of support for nine Indian languages in November 2025, India has emerged as our second-largest market. We plan to allocate $2.5 million over the next 12 to 24 months to initiate our operations in Bengaluru,” explained co-founder Karan Goel, who boasts a Ph.D. from Stanford and is an alumnus of IIT Delhi.
“A significant portion of this investment will be directed towards recruiting researchers, as we prioritize foundational development,” Goel elaborated.
Founded in September 2023 by luminaries from the Stanford AI Lab—Goel, Albert Gu, Brandon Yang, and Arjun Desai—the startup has successfully secured a substantial $100 million in funding from renowned investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, and American semiconductor giant Nvidia.
The new office in India will commence with a compact team of approximately 10 personnel, with plans for future expansion. “This team will focus on onboarding and maintaining client relationships.
India presents us with scalability, and most importantly, we aim to tailor our offerings to meet local business demands. We are rapidly growing; our workforce has increased from 20 to 100 in just two years, and we are hiring globally,” stated Goel.
“While many startups in India are developing applications utilizing voice AI for purposes such as tutoring and customer support—operating on a higher layer from us—our focus lies at the foundational model level. We train the models from their inception and construct the infrastructure necessary for real-time functionality,” he continued.
“Cartesia serves as a foundational counterpart to OpenAI, specifically for interactive voice models. Our platform empowers startups and enterprises to create customized solutions, while the core models and low-latency systems originate from us,” further noted Goel.
Enterprise and Startup Adoption
Cartesia has garnered traction within substantial enterprises, including the property platform Magicbricks, the conversational customer support firm Gupshup, and One Point One Solutions, a BPO.
On the startup front, Cartesia collaborates with the Indian conversational voice AI enterprise Grey Labs and edtech brands like SpeakX and Supernova, which specialize in voice AI tutoring, as Goel highlighted.
“These entities leverage our real-time voice infrastructure to enhance customer interaction scalability, automate queries, and provide experiences that are more natural and human-like,” Goel added.
In the competitive landscape of the US, Cartesia faces rivals such as Deepgram, PlayHT, and Hume AI, which also specialize in low-latency speech APIs and infrastructures for real-time voice applications.
Cultural Perspectives: India vs. the US
“The enthusiasm for research and development in India remains notably low, primarily due to a focus on cost among corporations,” noted Goel, contrasting this with US enterprises that do not primarily frame their approach in terms of expenses.
In the United States, companies express interest in how to invest in collaborative growth, aiming to address larger systemic challenges together. Conversely, the Indian approach emphasizes a different mindset.
“This difference highlights a considerable mentality gap; fostering a growth-oriented perspective is just as essential as maintaining cost efficiency,” concluded Goel.
Source link: M.economictimes.com.
