The former CRED, YES Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank executive will lead Smallest AI’s BFSI revenue and partnerships as the voice-tech company targets India’s banks, lenders and insurers.
Smallest AI has appointed Siddharth Sharma as president for banking, financial services and insurance in India, a move that signals the San Francisco-based voice technology company’s intent to push deeper into one of its fastest-growing markets. The company said Sharma will lead revenue and partnerships for its BFSI business, working with co-founder and chief executive Sudarshan Kamath as it expands its enterprise sales effort in India.
The hire comes after Smallest AI announced more than $21 million in total funding in July, including a $13 million Series A round led by Seligman Ventures, according to TechCrunch and other industry reports. The company has positioned Voice 4.0, its enterprise voice platform, around real-time speech recognition and synthesis, with models such as Lightning TTS and Pulse STT designed to support customer-service and other high-volume calls.
Smallest AI has argued that its strongest opportunity in India lies with banks, non-bank lenders and insurers that need voice systems capable of handling collections and service calls in local languages. The company says its technology supports more than 14 Indian languages, alongside English, and can be deployed inside a customer’s own infrastructure, which matters for regulated institutions that want sensitive data to stay under their control.
Sharma arrives with more than two decades of experience across ICICI, YES Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, CRED and CashFlo. At Kotak Mahindra Bank, he led go-to-market work for digital initiatives, while at YES Bank he worked across the Unified Payments Interface, wallets, the Bharat Bill Payment System and the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System. Smallest AI said his background in banking partnerships and digital products will help it build relationships with lenders and insurers as it scales its voice agents across collections, servicing and onboarding.
The appointment reflects a broader shift in India’s financial sector, where banks and fintech companies are increasingly looking for automation tools that can cope with regional languages, phone-based interactions and compliance demands. Smallest AI says its combination of proprietary speech models and self-hosted deployment is aimed at that exact problem, and Sharma will be responsible for turning that pitch into commercial traction.
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