Indeed, America is the birthplace of Indian prodigies and the incubator of their dreams. Pranjali Awasthi, 16, wears eyeglasses and looks to be an ordinary Indian girl unless she announces herself as an entrepreneur and pioneer. Unlike Indian-origin business executives who worked their way up to the C-suite of American companies, Pranjali made waves as her own boss when she was 15 in 2022. With her innovative notion, she has entered the AI-driven commercial scene, where two titans—Google and Microsoft—have clashed to establish their dominance in artificial intelligence.
While most Indian-origin kids her age (under 15) competed for the Scripps National Spelling Bee trophy, Pranjali Awasthi aimed to threaten Google’s dominance in the online search scene. During the process, she took the entrepreneurial plunge and founded Delv.AI, an AI firm valued at more than $12 million. With Delv.AI celebrating its second anniversary, Pranjali heads a team of ten technology enthusiasts and oversees important departments such as coding, operations, and customer service.
Delv.AI, developed by Pranjali Awasthi, is a cutting-edge search tool that automates the process of extracting data from a sea of internet information. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to analyse questions and show precise information in the form of interactive charts and maps for easier understanding. It also generates summaries of uploaded PDFs and offers significant data insights. Her AI-driven idea is a gift to scholars in this age of information overload.
Pranjali, one of the few youngest members of the select club of prodigious entrepreneurs, credits her interest in technology to her father, a computer engineer who relocated to Miami, Florida, from India when she was 11 years old. Interestingly, her learning threshold for coding in India was at the juvenile age of seven, when children practice phonics. With easy access to computer science and math programmes at schools in the United States, her interest in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning grew.
Within two years of residing in Miami, she had the opportunity to intern on machine learning projects at Florida International University, just as OpenAI’s GPT3 was making headlines as a groundbreaking innovation. This piqued her interest, and a billion-dollar company idea struck the dormant entrepreneur within her. There was plenty of motivation for her at home and elsewhere to pursue her interest in emerging technology while balancing ordinary schoolwork.
After successfully completing the internship, Pranjali Awasthi felt more encouraged to create a disruptive company model based on AI technology. She enrolled in Miami Hack Week, a 12-week AI business accelerator programme sponsored by Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot, co-founders of San Francisco-based venture capital company Backend Capital. With her parents’ steadfast support (unlike most Indian parents, who oppose the idea of taking a break from school), she placed her high school education on hold and focused her efforts on developing her company idea for an effective data extraction procedure.
Pranjali, who has been coding since the age of seven, created her own AI platform and started the firm Delv.AI in January 2022. It was first featured on Product Hunt, a renowned American website that showcases technological advances. She eventually got the opportunity to present her product at the Miami Tech Week event. It proved to be important in boosting her startup to new heights and bringing investors to her door. She raised $450,000 from angel investors after convincingly demonstrating her objective and vision for Delv.AI. Her journey continues.