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Smallest.ai gets $21 Million in Funding to Build Voice 4.0, the Next Generation of Enterprise Voice AI

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Raises $13 million Series A led by Seligman Ventures, bringing total funding to more than $21 millionIntroduces Voice 4.0 and Hydra, an asynchronous AI architecture designed  to make AI conversations as natural, responsive and scalable as human dialoguePulse STT and Lightning TTS rank among the top choices for enterprises on Artificial Analysis, leading on speed and cost efficiency across the global leaderboard

SAN FRANCISCO, July 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Smallest.ai, a San Francisco-based foundational AI research lab building the next generation of real-time voice AI infrastructure for enterprises, today announced it has surpassed $21 million in total funding following the close of a $13 million Series A led by Seligman Ventures with participation from Sierra Ventures and 3one4 Capital.

Industry forecasts expect the global Voice AI market to grow from $2.4 billion in 2024 to $47.5 billion by 2034, however, less than 1% of today’s global voice interactions are powered by AI. Enterprises continue to struggle with systems that sound robotic, fail under real-world complexity, introduce latency, and create operational challenges around reliability, compliance and governance. Smallest.ai is expanding its core voice AI platform across financial services, healthcare, contact centers, and business process outsourcing, where organizations are increasingly looking to deploy AI-powered voice agents at scale.

“Voice AI has gone through three generations of innovation, but each generation has ultimately hit the same wall,” said Sudarshan Kamath, founder and CEO of Smallest.ai. “The industry has focused on making models larger when the real challenge is architectural. Humans don’t wait for someone to finish speaking before they begin thinking. We listen, think, and respond simultaneously. Voice AI needs to work the same way. That’s why we built Smallest.ai around a real-time architecture that processes speech as it arrives, enabling faster, more natural conversations without sacrificing intelligence. By rethinking the stack instead of simply scaling models, we’re reducing latency to the point where voice interactions feel genuinely human.”

The End of Voice 3.0

Voice technology has evolved through three major eras:

Voice 1.0: Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems built around rigid phone trees and menu navigation.Voice 2.0: Machine learning-powered voice bots capable of basic intent recognition but unable to handle complexity.Voice 3.0: Generative AI voice agents powered by large language models that sound more natural but still rely on multiple disconnected systems working sequentially.

Today’s voice agents typically require a chain of separate technologies, including speech recognition, language models, text-to-speech systems, orchestration layers, memory systems, and guardrails. The result is high latency, brittle performance, and conversations that still feel distinctly artificial.

Beyond Voice 3.0: Introducing Voice 4.0 

Smallest.ai characterizes its innovation as Voice 4.0, a paradigm shift toward AI architectures that process listening, reasoning, action, and response in parallel. Rather than executing these functions sequentially, Voice 4.0 enables them to happen simultaneously, allowing AI systems to respond while conversations are still unfolding.

Hydra: The Architecture Behind Voice 4.0

At the center of Voice 4.0 is Hydra, Smallest.ai’s speech-to-speech model designed around asynchronous intelligence. Rather than waiting for one process to finish before starting another, Hydra performs multiple tasks in parallel, enabling real-time conversational flow, mid-conversation tool use, natural interruptions, and significantly lower latency.

Together, Hydra and Pulse STT Pro are designed to support real-time conversational interactions, with transcription latency measured in milliseconds rather than seconds.

The Smallest.ai Models

Smallest.ai’s broader platform includes Pulse STT Pro and Lightning V3.1, which rank among the top voice AI models on Artificial Analysis for speed, quality, and cost efficiency. Built for enterprise-scale deployments, Pulse STT Pro supports 38 languages and combines low-latency transcription with capabilities such as speaker diarization, emotion detection, code-switching, noise reduction, and built-in PII and PCI redaction.

Customers use Smallest.ai to automate enterprise voice workflows, reducing support costs by up to 80% while improving agent productivity by as much as 10x.

“Voice AI is creating a real impact on life and work,” said Ashish Kakran, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures. “Developers now increasingly talk to their machines instead of typing code. Smallest.ai is taking a fundamentally different approach to the category by rethinking architecture itself. Customers get an efficient vertically integrated stack and don’t need to waste time stitching models together. We believe the next generation of enterprise voice will be powered by Smallest AI.”

Smallest.ai currently works with organizations managing large-scale voice operations, including RingCentral, Truecaller, Readymode, Piramal, Kogta, Pocket, and others. The company has nearly 60 employees and plans significant expansion over the next year as demand for enterprise voice AI accelerates.

About Smallest.ai
Smallest.ai is a foundational AI research lab building the next generation of real-time voice AI infrastructure for enterprises. The company develops speech recognition, speech generation, and speech-to-speech systems designed to enable natural, scalable AI conversations across customer service, healthcare, financial services, and other high-volume communication environments. Headquartered in San Francisco, Smallest.ai serves enterprises globally through its Voice 4.0 platform and proprietary AI models. The company is backed by Seligman Ventures, Sierra Ventures, 3one4 Capital, Better Capital, Upsparks Capital, Schema Ventures, Tiny VC, DeVC, Mission Street Capital, and other angel investors.

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SOURCE Smallest.ai

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OneGov Launches “Pro”: A Dedicated Research Desk on Every Seat for Government Affairs Teams

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New tier brings AI Deep Research, policy dossiers, and committee intelligence to legislative professionals across all 50 states and Congress

AUSTIN, Texas, July 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — OneGov, the 50-state legislative intelligence platform, today announced the launch of OneGov Pro, a new tier built for government affairs teams that need to go deeper than tracking. Pro turns the everyday work of a research analyst — the kind that used to take a week of desk work — into cited answers and briefing-ready dossiers the same afternoon.

“Everything in OneGov, plus a research desk for teams that go deeper,” is how the company frames it. Where the core platform tracks bills, members, and committees across every state, Pro layers on the heaviest research and monitoring tools — on every seat.

A dedicated research analyst, on retainer

At the center of Pro are two flagship capabilities:

Deep Research — AI-powered, citation-backed answers to hard policy questions across every state and Congress. Ask the questions that used to take days; get research-grade answers with sources in seconds.Policy Dossiers — comprehensive, AI-generated issue briefs on any policy area, produced in minutes rather than weeks.

Pro extends well beyond research. The tier also includes:

AI Committee Intelligence — search committee summaries in natural language to surface emerging trends and policy risks, with saved and scheduled recurring queries.Statutes & Regulations monitoring — search state statutes and administrative rules, with automatic rulemaking alerts when proposed rules match tracked bill keywords.Lobbyist and company tracking — alerts the moment lobbyists capture testimony or change clients, plus monitoring of the organizations connected to your issues.Scheduled branded reports, shared workspaces, in-app team chat, a live-action feed window, and integrations with Slack, Google Drive, Outlook, OneDrive, Claude, and Codex.Predictive Voting (Beta) — AI vote forecasting built on district demographics, member history, and past voting patterns.

Basic coverage. Pro intelligence.

OneGov Pro is an optional per-seat upgrade — teams can mix standard and Pro seats, so the people doing the deepest work get the deepest tools without changing everyone’s plan.

“Great government affairs teams have always had a research analyst they wish they could clone. Pro is that analyst — on every seat. Ask the hard question in the morning and have a cited, briefing-ready answer in minutes, across all 50 states and Congress.” — William Fish, Founder & CEO, OneGov

To learn more or upgrade, visit OneGov.AI/Pro.

About OneGov

OneGov is a legislative intelligence platform providing comprehensive tracking and AI-powered analysis of bills, members, committees, statutes, and regulations across all 50 states and the U.S. Congress. Learn more at OneGov.AI.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/onegov-launches-pro-a-dedicated-research-desk-on-every-seat-for-government-affairs-teams-302840417.html

SOURCE OneGov

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The Death of the Manual Bill Tracker: Why the Spreadsheet Era of Government Affairs Is Ending

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OneGov argues that AI research, not another tracking column, is the real shift reshaping how policy teams work

AUSTIN, Texas, July 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — For decades, the tools of government affairs looked the same: a spreadsheet, a stack of bill PDFs, and an analyst willing to spend the week reading them. OneGov, the 50-state legislative intelligence platform, argues that era is ending — and the reason isn’t a better spreadsheet. It’s that the analytical work itself can now be done in minutes.

The hidden cost of manual tracking

The manual bill tracker was never really about tracking. It was about the human hours behind it: reading every version of a bill, watching four-hour committee hearings for the one exchange that mattered, cross-referencing lobbyist filings, and stitching it all into a memo before a client call. Multiply that across dozens of state legislatures moving at once, and “tracking” quietly becomes a full-time research operation that no spreadsheet ever captured.

That’s the work AI is now absorbing — not the row in the sheet, but the desk work behind it.

From “where is this bill?” to “what does it mean?”

The shift OneGov points to is a change in the question teams can ask. Manual tools answer where is this bill? The new generation answers what does it mean, where is it heading, and who’s driving it? — across every state at once:

Natural-language questions like “Which states are moving on AI regulation this session?” return citation-backed, research-grade answers in seconds instead of days.Full policy dossiers on an issue are generated in minutes, not weeks.Committee hearings become searchable — surfacing the key moment without watching the whole session.Rulemaking and lobbyist activity are monitored automatically, alerting teams the moment something touches their interests.

The spreadsheet isn’t going away — the manual part is

OneGov’s position is not that structure disappears. Teams will always want a clean view of what they track. What’s dying is the assumption that a human has to manually assemble the intelligence behind every row. When cited research, dossiers, and forecasting are a query away, the week of desk work that justified the manual tracker no longer needs to exist.

“Nobody ever loved the spreadsheet — they tolerated it because the alternative was reading everything yourself. AI didn’t kill the bill tracker; it gave teams back the week they used to spend feeding it.” — William Fish, Founder & CEO, OneGov

OneGov delivers this through OneGov Pro, a research tier that puts AI Deep Research, policy dossiers, and committee intelligence on every seat. Learn more at OneGov.AI/Pro.

About OneGov

OneGov is a legislative intelligence platform providing comprehensive tracking and AI-powered analysis of bills, members, committees, statutes, and regulations across all 50 states and the U.S. Congress. Learn more at OneGov.AI.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-death-of-the-manual-bill-tracker-why-the-spreadsheet-era-of-government-affairs-is-ending-302840418.html

SOURCE OneGov

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DR. PHONE FIX ANNOUNCES FURTHER EXTENSION OF NON-BROKERED CONVERTIBLE DEBENTURE UNIT FINANCING

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/NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES/

EDMONTON, AB, July 31, 2026 /CNW/ — Dr. Phone Fix Canada Corporation (“Dr. Phone Fix” or the “Company”) (TSXV: DPF) announces that it has received approval from the TSX Venture Exchange (the “TSXV”) to further extend the deadline of its previously announced non-brokered private placement (the “Offering”) of convertible debenture units (“Units”) of the Company for gross proceeds of up to $2,500,000, as described in its news release dated May 19, 2026 (the “Prior News Release”) to August 31, 2026.

Each Unit is comprised of (i) one $1,000 principal amount unsecured convertible debenture of the Company (a “Convertible Debenture”) and (ii) 3,125 common share (“Common Share”) purchase warrants of the Company (each, a “Warrant”). Additional detail on the Offering, including terms of the Convertible Debentures and Warrants, is set out in the Prior News Release.

All securities issued pursuant to the Offering, including any Common Shares issuable upon conversion of the Convertible Debentures or exercise of the Warrants and Finder’s Warrants, are subject to a statutory hold period of four months and one day from the closing of the Offering, in accordance with applicable securities laws and TSXV policies. 

The Offering remains subject to final acceptance of the TSXV.

This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described in this news release in the United States. Such securities have not been, and will not be, registered under the U.S. Securities Act, or any state securities laws, and, accordingly, may not be offered or sold within the United States, or to or for the account or benefit of persons in the United States or “U.S. Persons”, as such term is defined in Regulation S promulgated under the U.S. Securities Act, unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or pursuant to an exemption from such registration requirements.

About Dr. Phone Fix

Dr. Phone Fix is a national, award-winning, eco-friendly, and customer-centric leader in Canada’s cell phone and electronics repair and certified pre-owned device industry. Founded in 2019, the Company now operates 44 retail locations nationwide through a standardized and scalable operating platform designed to support consistent execution across multiple markets, delivering fast, reliable, and environmentally conscious repair services alongside a curated selection of certified pre-owned devices and premium accessories. Dr. Phone Fix maintains strong partnerships with OEMs and certified suppliers, ensuring consistently high-quality standards across its national footprint. With a focus on responsible device lifecycle management, customer service, and operational discipline, Dr. Phone Fix continues to set the benchmark for device care and resale in Canada.

NEITHER THE TSXV NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSXV) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS NEWS RELEASE.

Forward-Looking Information and Cautionary Statements

Certain information in this news release constitutes forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. Any statements that are contained in this news release that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as “may”, “should”, “anticipate”, “expect”, “potential”, “believe”, “intend” or the negative of these terms and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements in this news release include statements relating to: the final acceptance of the Offering by the TSXV; and the expected use of proceeds following the closing of the Offering. Forward-looking information in this news release is based on certain assumptions and expected future events, namely: the Company’s financial condition and development plans do not change as a result of unforeseen events; the TSXV will provide its final acceptance of the Offering; and the Company will be able to obtain the financing required in order to develop and continue its business and operations. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements, including but not limited to: the Company’s inability to obtain TSXV final acceptance for the Offering; the potential failure to complete the balance of the Offering or to raise the full anticipated gross proceeds; market conditions and investor demand for the Company’s securities; the Company’s inability to deploy the proceeds as currently intended; and general economic and market conditions. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list is not exhaustive. Readers are further cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are placed will occur. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and reflect the Company’s expectations as of the date hereof and are subject to change thereafter. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, estimates or opinions, future events or results or otherwise or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking information, except as required by applicable law.

SOURCE Dr. Phone Fix

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