Uplift AI raises $3.5mn in seed funding, eyes thousands of jobs in Pakistan

Uplift AI, a Pakistani voice AI startup, has secured $3.5 million in funding led by Y Combinator, an accelerator behind Airbnb, Dropbox, and GitLab, alongside Indus Valley Capital, Pakistan’s leading early-stage venture fund.

According to a statement, the funding round also saw participation from Pioneer Fund, Conjunction, Moment Ventures and angel investors from Silicon Valley.

Founded by Zaid Qureshi and Hammad Malik, former Apple and Amazon engineers, Uplift AI develops voice AI models for regional languages like Urdu, Punjabi, and Balochi — so people can use technology by just speaking in their local language.

The startup flagship model, Orator, speaks Urdu with human-like realism.

The company shared that the startup is gaining traction among developers and small businesses, with 1,000+ developers building with their APIs — from students creating FIR registration bots to entrepreneurs building health intake systems for rural clinics.

The startup believes that voice-first technology is key for Pakistan, where 42% of adults cannot read, which holds back the country economically.

“Voice technology has the potential to uplift our entire GDP by giving everyone access to knowledge and opportunity. We founded Uplift AI to make this happen now, rather than in the distant future,” said Hammad Malik, CEO, Uplift AI.

Backing the startup, Aatif Awan, Partner at Indus Valley Capital, believes that voice is the primary gateway to the digital economy in emerging markets. “Built by former Apple and Amazon engineers, Uplift AI is delivering the foundational voice AI infrastructure to unlock this massive opportunity.“

For the industries serving mass markets — banking, healthcare, agriculture, government — voice-first technology will unlock a market that text-based solutions cannot address.

“In Pakistan, agriculture doesn’t lack effort — it lacks accessible intelligence. Uplift AI’s voice technology lets us deliver that intelligence to farmers in their own language at scale. This has enabled us to lead the market in helping farmers increase yield by adopting AI,” said Sultan Raja, Head of AI Transformation, Syngenta Pakistan.

Zaid Qureshi, CTO of Uplift AI, says that the startup built everything in-house, from data gathering, labelling, and training, because off-the-shelf solutions always compromise on regional languages.

“Our approach is paying off — it’s heartening to get emails from customers telling us they find our model quality to be better than OpenAI and Google for these languages,“ he said.

With this funding, Uplift AI plans to bring voice-first technology to every language in Pakistan.

While the company sees itself as a global player specialising in voice technology for small regional languages, “in the short to medium term, Pakistan will remain our only focus,” Aatif told Business Recorder.

Hammad Malik, CEO of Uplift AI, said that around $1 million will be utilised on data gathering and labelling, which is expected to create thousands of jobs in Pakistan. “The rest will be used to do R&D to develop state-of-the-art speech understanding and speech generation models for the five major Pakistani languages.”

Hammad shared that Uplift AI is not yet engaging with government departments but noted that its platform is already accessible to startups and small businesses.

“Over 1,000 developers already use our API. Any startup or small business can sign up and start using our API right now.”