Venture Catalysts led a $400,000 pre-seed round for Vaani AI, a startup building a full-stack voice agent platform. Industry experts including Dr Abhishek Sharma (Meta) and Dr Viveka Kulharia (MoonValley) participated. Founded by IISc and IIT-Madras alumni, Vaani develops expressive text-to-speech models. It is part of Google for Startups AI Accelerator 2025 and NASSCOM GenAI Foundry.