Pixa AI, a Jaipur-based artificial intelligence startup, has launched Luna, which marks India’s first speech-to-speech foundational voice model that enables real-time, emotion-driven interactions without text intermediaries.
Founded by 25-year-old IIT-BHU alumnus Sparsh Agrawal in 2024, the company has raised an undisclosed seed round from Cred founder Kunal Shah, former Carlyle Asia Growth Partners MD Shankar Narayana, actor-investor Kunal Kapoor, and Nikhil Kamath’s WTFund.
Luna claims to differ from existing Indian voice AI solutions like Gnani and Sarvam by operating as a pure speech-to-speech system rather than routing through text conversion layers. This architecture, the company claims, enables sub-600-millisecond end-to-end latency.
“The future of voice AI isn’t automating call centres but developing artificial emotional intelligence. Humans relate to sarcasm, tone, and emotion,” Agrawal said.
The model detects real-time tonal shifts like anger, excitement, or calm and adjusts its pace, tone, and delivery dynamically. According to company internal benchmarks, Luna scored 5.24% on ASR-FLUERS tests, 1.3% word error rate (WER) for text-to-speech accuracy, and 4.62 on mean opinion score (MOS) assessments of voice quality, outperforming several established competitors, including ElevenLabs.
The startup plans an API-first model allowing developers and enterprises to integrate Luna across education, gaming, and healthcare verticals.
Pixa AI is currently running proof-of-concept pilots with an Indian automobile manufacturer for AI-driven in-car entertainment and a US-based wellness startup for interactive storytelling. The company has also drawn interest from customer service sectors seeking emotionally adaptive sales and support agents. “We’re targeting around 200-300% growth over FY25 and FY26, driven by expanding deployments across education, entertainment, and enterprise voice AI applications,” Agrawal said.
Luna currently supports English only, with multilingual capabilities including Indian languages expected within two to three months.
“Our focus is building Luna into a global AI innovation emerging from India. Scaling to that level will naturally require strategic investments of a similar order, and we are already in discussions with key partners and investors sharing this long-term vision,” Agrawal added.
