“India has become our second-largest market post the launch of support for nine Indian languages in November 2025. We plan to invest $2.5 million in the next 12-24 months to start operations in Bengaluru,” said cofounder Karan Goel, a Stanford Ph. D. researcher and IIT Delhi alumnus. Most of this investment will go in hiring researchers as we are a company focussed on the foundation layer,’’ Goel added.
Founded in September 2023 by Stanford AI Lab researchers Goel, Albert Gu, Brandon Yang, and Arjun Desai, the firm has raised $100 million in total from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, and American chipmaker Nvidia.
“Our India office will have a small team of around 10 people, that could scale over time,” said Goel.
The India team will look after onboarding and managing new clients. “India will give us scale and most importantly, we want to build for Indian business needs. We are a high-growth company. In the last two years we’ve gone from 20 people to 100. We are hiring globally,” explained Goel.
“Most startups in India are building applications for using voice AI, like tutoring or customer support. They sit on a layer on top of us. We operate at the foundational model layer, we train the models from scratch and build the infrastructure to run them in real time.
“Cartesia is like OpenAI for interactive voice models. Startups and enterprises use our platform to build their specific solutions, but the core models and low-latency systems come from us,” Goel added.
Adoption across enterprises, startups
Cartesia is seeing adoption across large enterprises such as property platform Magicbricks, conversational customer support firm Gupshup, and One Point One Solutions, a BPO. As for startups, Cartesia is working with Indian conversational voice AI firm Grey Labs, and edtechs like SpeakX and Supernova, which offer voice AI tutoring, noted Goel.
“These companies rely on our real-time voice infrastructure so they can scale customer interactions, automate queries, and deliver more natural, human-like experiences,” Goel added.
In the US, Cartesia competes with Deepgram, PlayHT, and Hume AI, which also sell low-latency speech APIs and infra for real-time voice applications.
India vs US: mentality gap
“The appetite for R&D in India is very low because corporations here are highly cost-focussed,” said Goel, and added that in the US, companies don’t view things through a cost lens alone.
Instead, they ask how they can invest more in us so we can grow together and eventually help solve bigger problems. In India, the perspective is quite the opposite.
“That is a big mentality gap, because growth-oriented thinking is just as important as cost efficiency,” noted Goel.