Viji: I had a dream recently. We were at a startup event, and someone handed us judging scorecards. You're here to evaluate the pitches, right? We were there to pitch. Funny. But also telling. We are raising funds now, and I am half-worried the investor will make the same assumption.
RK: When she told me, I laughed. I can see that happening. At our age, people expect you to fund startups. Not pitch them. But here is the thing: We are not building a voice intelligence company despite being 50+. We are building it because of it.
Viji: A friend said: I appreciate your guts and passion. Fire in a pot belly. Pot belly? RK eats once a day. I eat once every 18 hours. Not happening. The fire? It's only getting stronger.
RK: Three decades in technology. Signal processing, LLMs, cryptography. Five years ago, I added neuroscience. How decisions form before they become words. The dots connected. I could finally analyze what I have been chasing: thoughts to words.
Viji: I built programs at scale. Led teams. Survived impossible deadlines. Built customer relationships that actually lasted. Here's what I learned: Technology only matters when it solves real problems.
RK: We have been married twenty-two years. When she says no softly? I can negotiate. No with that lilt? I am pushing my luck. No sharply? Conversation is over.
Viji: He's not exaggerating. And it's not just in marriage. Every business conversation has this. If you listen to the voice, you can hear the difference. In the transcript? No. No. No. They are all identical. In the voice? Three completely different signals. We capture what the transcript can't.
RK: Right now, Indian enterprises are recording thousands of calls. Sales. Collections. Customer conversations. Getting transcripts. Missing signals. Yet, making decisions.
Viji: Because the decision is not in what the customer said. It's in how they said it. When someone says, I will think about it, on a sales call. Are they considering? Or are they done? The answer is in the pause. The tonal shift that says: I am being polite but this is over. You can't transcribe your way to that understanding.
RK: We built Pradhi to capture that. Three years analyzing Indian voices specifically. Building a voice stack from scratch to decode how we actually communicate. We call it Decision Signal Intelligence. Voice analysis that reveals not what was said, but what was signaled and what you need to decide on. So where do you start when you've built something like this?
We started with customer feedback at Sankara Eye Hospital. One person speaks. Sankara is our first client. We have a deep personal connect there. They allow us to do our research on their data. That's our data. Then at Sankara we implemented the first two-way communication. Performance appraisals. We were testing our hypothesis with our solutions and we got immediate validation.
Viji: We always knew we wanted to help enterprises maximize their revenue. So, sales conversations. We started with insurance because we want to solve India's insurance penetration problem. Insurance is sold not bought. We worked with agents on the ground. Studied the challenges. Alok Rungta, MD & CEO of Generali Central Life Insurance, believed voice is a game changer. He funded our research with IIT Delhi. Top sales executives can tell you which calls will close. That's a rare skill. We are institutionalizing that intuition. So, even when your best salesperson leaves, their ability to recognize patterns can live on in your enterprise.
RK: Next comes collections. The pattern is clear: every industry has conversations where decisions hide in the voice, not just the words. Right now, we're working on something disruptive with our early investor. The early signals? Exactly what we hoped for.
Viji: Which brings us to today. We're launching our new brand and website. Our story. Our solution. What our customers are saying.
RK: There's a picture in our office. Secretariat. The racehorse that won the Triple Crown in 1973. In the film about him, the owner Penny Tweedy tells her jockey: Let him run. We watched that scene a hundred times. Because at some point, you stop preparing and you just run your race.
Viji: This is our race now. If conversations drive your revenue, we should talk.
Viji & RK: Thanks for reading.