Uplift AI is building foundational voice infrastructure for under-served languages, starting with Urdu and other South Asian dialects. Its platform offers speech recognition, text-to-speech and conversational AI APIs that allow third parties to add localized voice interfaces without creating their own language models. The technology is already in production: Khan Academy used it to release 2,500 educational videos in Urdu, Syngenta is deploying it to deliver spoken guidance to farmers, and over 1,000 developers are actively building on the APIs. Co-founders Zaid Qureshi and Hammad Malik, both former Apple and Amazon engineers, assembled the entire data-collection and model-training pipeline in-house to avoid quality compromises common in off-the-shelf solutions. Investors view the company as critical infrastructure addressing the next billion voice users rather than a single consumer app. With $3.5 million in seed capital now secured, Uplift AI plans to expand language coverage into the MENA region, deepen conversational intelligence, and integrate more tightly with education, public-sector and enterprise workflows.

Total raised

$4M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Jan 2026