Avengers, Assemble!

Meet Our Team

The founding team consists of experienced leaders with a strong research & academic background in Natural Language Understanding, Speech Synthesis, and High Performance Computing. The team has been building production and consumer-grade AI systems for the last 10 years.


  Careers

1. Founding Engineer - ML Research

2. Founding Member - Marketing


Co-Founder

Tushar Shinde

  • Tushar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Vaani AI Research. He previously led product at fintech unicorn OneCard, built enterprise NLU systems at Hypersonix AI, and worked in data science at Publicis Groupe. With research roots in reinforcement learning at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc, Bangalore) and entrepreneurial stints including the multi-city tea franchise Badnaam Chai (100K+ cups/month), Tushar now drives Vaani’s mission to build infrastructure for human-like voice AI.
Co-Founder

Nitesh Tripathi

  • Nitesh is the Co-Founder and CTO of Vaani AI Research. A specialist in algorithm design and graph theory from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore he is a long-time NLP enthusiast with deep experience building AI teams and products. Nitesh previously built the data science team from the ground up at Hypersonix AI in the US, was a Member of Technical Staff at ThoughtSpot, and worked on machine learning at Bewgle (acquired). At Vaani, he leads the development of Vaani’s full-stack voice AI infrastructure.
Co-Founder

Nitish Mishra

  • Nitish Mishra is the Co-Founder and CIO of Vaani AI Research. With a background in data science from IIT Madras, he has worked at the intersection of ML and DevOps at the SG Brain Research Center (a joint IIT-M & Government of India initiative). Nitish also co-founded Foxrobe, where he scaled operations to $100K in annual revenue. At Vaani, he oversees information systems and drives the company’s infrastructure and operational strategy for building scalable voice AI.
AI Research

Abhinash Khare

  • Abhinash Khare helps AI Research drive forward at Vaani. He specializes in natural language understanding and speech synthesis, with research roots at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Abhinash has worked on the Voice & Conversations team at Amazon Alexa, was Lead Data Scientist for calibration modelling at ShareChat, and contributed to documents and data analytics at EY. An applied researcher with published papers, he now advances Vaani’s core models powering human-like voice AI.
AI Research

Risan Raja

  • Raja leads the AI Research at Vaani. He is a mathematics prodigy who began coding at 16, and he now also heads Vaani’s efforts in buidling India native empathtic and most expressive Text-To-Speech (TTS) and foundation model development. With experience spanning multiple roles and a strong passion for research, Risan focuses on advancing the core systems that will power the next decade of human-AI conversations in a way that sounds more human.
Founding Engineer

Shailesh Kumar

  • Shailesh is a Founding Engineer in ML Research at Vaani Research Labs. An IIT Madras graduate, he brings experience in AI/ML engineering and full-stack development from research work at IIT Hyderabad and IIT Madras’s SMT and SPRING labs. Shailesh has built systems ranging from knowledge extraction pipelines and speech synthesis to bioinformatics tools at the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre. At Vaani, he focuses on advancing speech technology and scaling the infrastructure behind human-like voice AI.
Founding Engineer

Nishank Kaul

  • Nishank is an MLOps Wizard at Vaani. He specializes in building resilient, scalable, and secure infrastructure for AI systems. Previously, Nishank worked as a DevOps Engineer at StringifyAI, where he designed and containerized cloud-native applications, optimized costs on GCP, and streamlined CI/CD pipelines. He also held a DevOps role at Bimaplan, automating AWS infrastructure and improving availability through disaster recovery solutions. At Vaani, Nishank ensures that our voice AI models run reliably, efficiently, and at scale.
Business Development

Chandrasekran Y

  • Chandra is a Business Development Executive at Vaani AI Research. He brings sharp business instincts and a strong ability to build trust with people, helping enterprises adopt technology that feels human. At Vaani, Chandra focuses on taking our voice AI deeper into businesses, moulding into the language they understand and finally ensuring our AI agents don’t just work but truly connect like real conversations should.
Marketing & Content

Khushi Kejriwal

  • Khushi drives Creative Marketing at Vaani Research Labs. She brings the sharp storytelling skills and fresh energy to shape how the world sees and hears our voice AI. From words to strategy, Khushi crafts narratives that connect, inspire, and build trust. At Vaani, she focuses on making sure our breakthrough technology just doesn't stay in a bot; but is actually understood, utilized and embraces by our customers and builders.
Full Stack Engineer

Priyanshu Sharma

  • Priyanshu is a Full-Stack Developer at Vaani Research Labs. With strong experience across frontend and backend, he plays a key role in strengthening the stack behind our voice AI infrastructure. From APIs to user-facing apps, Priyanshu helps Vaani move faster and deliver smoother experiences as we scale. He thrives on building systems that balance speed, reliability, and great user experience.
ML Research Engineer

Jigyansh Rathore

  • Jigyansh is part of the ML Research team at Vaani. He focuses on training and refining models that make our AI sound less like a bot and more like a human. With a core area of work being budilding ultra-reliable speech recognition models, he also has a knack for turning dense research papers into production-ready code, Jigyansh helps transform math into models and models into natural conversations, bringing both rigor and craft to Vaani’s voice AI.
ML Research Engineer

Arjun Aryaa

  • Arjun is an ML Researcher by passion and now a core member of Vaani’s expressive Indic TTS initiative, working on building more natural and empathetic speech models. He previously worked at IIT Madras's SPRING Lab to build speech translation models, and at IIT Hyderabad, to deploy large-scale ASR models for Indian speech tones. At Vaani, he focuses on advancing multilingual speech technology to bring human-like nuance to voice AI.
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