Maya Research, an AI company building a voice interface for the Majority of the World, has raised$1.9 million in a seed round led by South Park Commons. Maya is building a voice interface for a world where billions of people interact with technology through conversation rather than typing, tapping, and navigating complex interfaces.At the core of this interface are conversational models designed to speak, think, and respond like a native speaker, adapting to local languages, contexts, and conversational nuances.While most AI products still treat voice as a microphone attached to a text system, Maya is building conversational intelligence that enables more natural interactions between people and technology. Founded in 2025 by BS Dheemanth Reddy and Bharath Kumar Kakumani, Maya Research has crossed440,000 model downloads on Hugging Face, amassed3 million app downloads across India, Southeast Asia, and MENA, and become theonly Indian company on Speech Arena, where its open-source voice model Maya 1 ranks among theleading open-weight models globally. Maya 1, the company's open-source emotive voice model released under Apache 2.0, holds a Quality Elo of 1,051 on Speech Arena, placing it6th among open-weight models globallyand on par with OpenAI's GPT-Realtime-2. While Maya's consumer application creates a data flywheel for high-quality, hard-to-collect data, it provides a unique advantage for the company to create models faster and better, continuously. While voice AI has made significant progress in transcription, translation, and speech generation, the challenge of building systems that can participate in natural human conversation remains largely unsolved. For Maya's founders, who grew up in the small towns of Vempalli and Ongole in Andhra Pradesh before studying at New York University, that challenge represents one of the largest opportunities in technology. As billions of people come online through voice rather than keyboards, the company believes the next breakthrough will come from systems that can listen, understand, and respond as naturally as people do.
