Smallest AI Appoints Siddharth Sharma President of BFSI India After $21 Million Round

Smallest AI appointed Siddharth Sharma as President of Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance, India, the company said on October 27, 2026. Sharma will own revenue and partnerships for the BFSI business and report to co-founder and CEO Sudarshan Kamath. The appointment follows the company's $21 million funding round announced in July 2026. The announcement was distributed by GlobeNewswire.

Sharma's Banking Background and BFSI Mandate

Sharma has spent over 20 years in banking and financial services, across ICICI, YES Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and CRED. At CRED he led partnerships with banks and financial institutions. At Kotak Mahindra Bank he was Vice President and Head of Go-to-Market for Digital Initiatives, and before that he was Senior Vice President at YES Bank, working across Unified Payments Interface, wallets, Bharat Bill Payment System and the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System. He was most recently Vice President, Credit & Strategy, at CashFlo.

Based in Mumbai, Sharma will lead go-to-market with banks, NBFCs, insurers and financial-services partners, build the partner network in the sector, and shape how voice agents are deployed across collections, servicing and onboarding. Smallest AI builds its own speech recognition and synthesis models, covers over 14 Indian languages alongside English, and supports self-hosted deployment inside a customer's own infrastructure.

"Banks expect a partner who understands how they evaluate, govern and scale technology," Kamath said. "Siddharth has built digital banking businesses inside India's largest banks and has a history of building mutually beneficial financial partnerships."

Smallest AI's Funding and Deployment Record

According to akta.pro company records, Smallest AI has raised a $13 million Series A led by Seligman Ventures in July 2026, a $1 million non-equity assistance round led by Amazon Web Services in October 2025, an $8 million seed led by Sierra Ventures in September 2025, and a pre-seed round in March 2025. The same records put total funding at $22 million and list four funding rounds. The records also show a March 2026 partnership with AI Grants India to provide free voice AI infrastructure to Indian startups and SMEs across 100+ hackathons and campus programs over 12-18 months.

Earlier Smallest AI Partnerships

In October 2026, Tenstorrent and Smallest.ai announced a partnership to run Smallest.ai's Lightning V2 text-to-speech model on Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole servers, aiming for on-premises voice AI with data sovereignty, Unite.AI reported. In July 2026, Smallest.ai's Lightning TTS ranked first among real-time models for Hindi customer support on Voice Arena, ahead of ElevenLabs, Cartesia and Sarvam, EIN Presswire reported. In May 2026, Smallest published benchmarks comparing Deepgram Nova-3 against its Pulse speech-to-text service on streaming latency, word error rate, pricing and voice agent pipeline integration.