Kochi: Two young women from Kerala’s Kochi have jumped on the AI bandwagon, driven by their spirit to build technology and business. They call their dream SuperBryn, an early-stage startup functioning from the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) campus at Kalamassery, Kochi.

Neethu Mariam Joy and Nikkitha Shanker met each other on their entrepreneurial expeditions after their successful stints at startups and MNCs. While Neethu, a first-time entrepreneur, has an excellent academic track record, Nikkitha has already proven her entrepreneurial skills with an e-commerce startup.

With SuperBryn, the two have plunged into the country’s fast-evolving deep-tech ecosystem with a mission to build AI agentic workflows and a fundamental AI infrastructure layer. AI agentic workflows denote automated processes that use AI to perform tasks without human intervention. They can streamline complex processes and improve efficiency.

To start with, the Neethu and Nikkitha venture helps developers build voice AI agents quickly, easily, and affordably. Voice/speech recognition using AI has been a key area of Neethu, who has completed her PhD from IIT-Madras on the subject. She was the topper of her B-Tech and M-Tech batches at BITS-Pilani and has done her Post-doctorate research at King’s College London.

“Over 800 million internet users in India will predominantly interact through voice as their first choice, rather than through text. This opens up vast use cases, and applications will start exploding. We want to be that single Voice AI layer that is going to enable developers to launch such applications quickly to the Indian market,” Neethu told Onmanorama.

Nikkitha understood the potential of the Voice AI layer while building her e-comm company based in Bengaluru. “A lot of elderly people need help navigating e-comm platforms. Language, especially text, remains a barrier for many. AI applications can bridge the gap to a great extent,” Nikkitha said.

The co-founders see India’s linguistic diversity as an opportunity for growth, as unlike countries where one language is predominantly used, the Indian population is a vast market for AI-enabled voice tools. They are expected to launch their first product, an AI agentic workflow in the health sector, within two months. “Our larger vision is to democratise voice AI applications for the Bharat population,” they said.

The path they have chosen, however, is not an easy one, they know. “While we were building a healthcare voice AI agent we were fired up by real demand. Customers were ready and money was in, and we still couldn’t ship on time. We were stuck and frustrated.

“Whether we tried building the voice AI models through direct integrations or using platforms like Vapi, Retell etc, we experienced several challenges to release a voice AI model for the Indian market,” Nikkitha, an Electrical Engineer from NIT Calicut, said.

According to them, the challenges include a lack of third-party integrations, difficulty mixing multiple real-time models, and high cost. They decided to build a voice AI platform for India as a solution to the challenges.

SuperBryn was bootstrapped last year with Neethu initiating the procedures. Soon Nikkitha joined as she was keen to build a tech company as her e-commerce startup grew up to clock $2 million ARR with a team of over 60 employees. Nikkitha was previously selected for prestigious entrepreneurial orientation programmes such as the 10k Goldman Sachs, JioGenNext (B-03) and 500 Global Launchpad Japan.

Neethu was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Antler and a cohort member in GSF and Tamil Nadu Startup Cell. Neethu and Nikkitha were connected by Neethu’s husband Senu Sam, who has founded Mykare, a growing health-tech startup from Kerala.

Startup Saturday Season 2 is Onmanorama’s exclusive bi-weekly series featuring informative and inspiring stories from Kerala’s thriving startup ecosystem. The season 1 of the series featured stirring stories of 40 startups which showcased the diversity of the Kerala startup ecosystem.

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