Indeed, America is the cradle for Indian prodigies and the incubator of their dreams. 16-year-old Pranjali Awasthi wearing eyeglasses appears like an ordinary Indian girl unless she introduces herself as an innovator and founder. Unlike Indian-origin business leaders who climbed up a ladder to the C-suite of American conglomerates, Pranjali made headlines as her own boss when she was 15 in 2022. With her disruptive idea, she has ventured into the AI-driven business landscape where two giants – Google and Microsoft – have locked horns to establish their supremacy over artificial intelligence.
While most Indian-origin kids of her age (under 15) were vying for the Scripps National Spelling Bee trophy, Pranjali Awasthi was looking to disrupt the online search landscape dominated by Google. In the process, she took the entrepreneurial plunge to found her AI startup, Delv.AI, which is currently valued at over $12 million. With Delv.AI having celebrated its second anniversary, Pranjali leads a team of 10 technology enthusiasts and helms such key departments as coding, operations, and customer service.
PC: Pranjali Awasthi | Linkedin (AI generated)
Pranjali Awasthi’s Delv.AI is a new age search platform that streamlines the data extraction process from the sea of online content. It employs artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to understand queries and present specific information in the form of interactive charts and maps to facilitate better understanding. It also generates summaries of uploaded pdfs and provides valuable insights into the data. Her AI-driven innovation is a boon for researchers in the current era of information overload.
One of the few youngest members in the elite club of prodigious entrepreneurs, Pranjali owes her passion for technology to her father, a computer engineer, who moved to Miami, Florida from India when she was 11. Interestingly, the tender age of 7, when kids practice phonics, was her threshold of learning coding in India. With easy access to computer science and math programs at school level in the US, her passion intensified for emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Within two years of their living in Miami, she got to intern in machine learning projects at Florida International University when OpenAI’s GPT3 was making waves as a ground-breaking innovation. This captured her imagination, and thus, a billion-dollar business idea hit the latent entrepreneur in her. There was no dearth of motivation for her at home and beyond to nurture her interest in emerging technologies while juggling regular school work.
On successful completion of the internship, Pranjali Awasthi felt more inclined to develop a disruptive business model harnessing AI technology. She joined a 12-week AI startup accelerator program, Miami Hack Week, run by Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot, the co-founders of Backend Capital, a venture capital firm in San Francisco. With unwavering support of her parents (unlike most Indian parents opposing the idea of taking a break from school), she put her high school studies on hold and dedicated her time to working on her business idea for an efficient data extraction process.
Pranjali, who has been a coder since the age of 7, developed her own AI platform and founded the startup, Delv.AI, in January 2022. It was first launched on Product Hunt, a popular American website displaying tech innovations. Eventually, an opportunity to showcase her product at the Miami Tech Week event came her way. It proved to be pivotal in propelling her startup to new highs and brought investors to her door. Demonstrating her mission and vision for Delv.AI with conviction, she has been able to raise $450,000 from angel investors. And her journey continues….
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