Uplift AI secures $3.5m seed round, plans large-scale job creation in Pakistan

Uplift AI, a Pakistan-based voice technology startup, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding as it looks to expand voice-first AI products and create thousands of local jobs.

The round was led by Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator behind companies like Airbnb, Dropbox and GitLab, with participation from Indus Valley Capital. Other investors include Pioneer Fund, Conjunction, Moment Ventures, and a group of angel investors from Silicon Valley.

Founded by former Apple and Amazon engineers Zaid Qureshi and Hammad Malik, Uplift AI is focused on building voice AI systems for Pakistan’s regional languages, including Urdu, Punjabi and Balochi. The company’s goal is simple: enable people to interact with technology by speaking naturally in their own language.

Its flagship model, Orator, is designed to speak Urdu with near-human fluency, a capability the startup believes is critical in a country where literacy remains a major barrier to digital access.

Uplift AI says its tools are already gaining traction. More than 1,000 developers are using its APIs to build real-world applications ranging from FIR registration bots to voice-based health intake systems for rural clinics.

The company argues that voice-first technology is particularly important for Pakistan, where an estimated 42% of adults are unable to read, limiting participation in the digital economy.

“Voice technology can unlock access to knowledge and opportunity for millions of people,” said Hammad Malik, CEO of Uplift AI. “We started Uplift AI to make that impact now, not years down the line.”

Investors see a large opportunity in this approach. Aatif Awan, Partner at Indus Valley Capital, said voice is often the most practical gateway to the digital economy in emerging markets.

“Built by engineers with deep experience at Apple and Amazon, Uplift AI is creating the core voice infrastructure needed to unlock this market at scale,” he said.

The implications extend across mass-market sectors such as banking, healthcare, agriculture and government services,  areas where text-based digital solutions often fail to reach large segments of the population.

“In Pakistan, agriculture doesn’t lack effort; it lacks accessible intelligence,” said Sultan Raja, Head of AI Transformation at Syngenta Pakistan. “Uplift AI’s voice technology allows us to deliver that intelligence directly to farmers in their own language, helping them adopt AI and improve yields.”

According to CTO Zaid Qureshi, Uplift AI has taken a fully in-house approach to development, handling data collection, labeling and model training internally, a decision driven by the limitations of off-the-shelf solutions for regional languages.

“That investment is paying off,” he said. “We regularly hear from customers who say our models outperform OpenAI and Google for these languages.”

With the new funding, the startup plans to expand voice-first AI support across all major Pakistani languages. While the company sees long-term global potential in serving underserved languages worldwide, Pakistan remains its immediate priority.

“In the short to medium term, our focus is entirely on Pakistan,” Awan told Business Recorder.

Malik said approximately $1 million from the funding will be allocated to data collection and labeling,  an effort expected to generate thousands of local jobs. The remaining capital will be used for research and development, particularly in advancing speech recognition and speech generation for Pakistan’s five major languages.

While Uplift AI is not currently working directly with government departments, Malik noted that its platform is already open to startups and small businesses.

“More than 1,000 developers are already using our API,” he said. “Any startup or small business can sign up and start building today.”