Pranjali Awasthi, a teenage girl, raises Rs 3 Crore from her AI startup Delv.AI

Pranjali Awasthi, a 16-year-old Indian prodigy, has taken the tech world by storm with her artificial intelligence startup – Delv.AI. During a Miami Tech Week event, Awasthi revealed that she founded her company in January 2022 and has successfully raised funding of around Rs 3.7 million. Delv.AI's LinkedIn profile already has a team of up to 10 employees. At the event, Awasthi acknowledged her father as the primary source of inspiration for her entrepreneurial journey.

Pranjali's fascination with technology was ignited early on, influenced by her engineer father's advocacy for computer science education in schools. This encouragement led her to start programming at just seven years old, laying the foundations for her extraordinary path. Her family's move to Florida at age 11 provided more opportunities, allowing her access to computer science classes and competitive math programs. However, her internship at Florida International University's research laboratories when she was 13 set the stage for her entrepreneurial venture.

During this internship, Pranjali immersed herself in machine learning projects while she attended virtual high school due to the pandemic. During this time, OpenAI launched ChatGPT-3 beta, sparking her idea to streamline the extraction and summarization of research data using AI. Delv.AI was conceived during this period, and Pranjali aimed to use machine learning to improve data mining processes and eliminate data silos.

Her journey reached a significant milestone when she joined an AI startup accelerator in Miami led by Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot of Backend Capital. Pranjali's acceptance marked her commitment to pursuing her dreams, even temporarily leaving high school. She revealed that the beta launch of Delv.AI on Product Hunt was exceptionally successful. For those who don't know, Product Hunt is a platform that helps anyone share their software for free.

Awasthi says Delv.AI's primary goal is to help researchers efficiently access specific information amidst growing online content. The accelerator program was crucial in assisting Pranjali in securing investments from On Deck and Village Global. Delv.AI raised $450,000 (around Rs 3.7 crore) in total funding and currently has a valuation of around $12 million.