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Pranjali Awasthi, an 18-year-old Indian-origin tech prodigy, is making headlines with her artificial intelligence startup Delv.AI. She launched her company in January 2022 and has already secured funding worth $450,000 (approximately ₹3.7 crore). The startup, now valued at around $12 million (₹100 crore), has a growing team listed on its LinkedIn profile.

Delv.AI is designed to help researchers and academics easily locate specific information across vast digital content. The startup gained traction after support from accelerator programs like On Deck and Village Global, which played a key role in securing early-stage funding.

Awasthi handled everything from coding and operations to customer support while leading a small but efficient team. She credits her engineer father as her biggest influence, sharing how his encouragement to explore computer science sparked her interest in technology. She began coding at the age of seven.

Her family’s move to Florida when she was 11. It was an internship at Florida International University’s research labs at 13 that truly ignited her entrepreneurial spirit. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she worked on machine learning projects while attending virtual high school.

The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 inspired her to explore ways of using AI to simplify research data extraction and summarization. This idea became the foundation for Delv.AI. Her acceptance into an AI startup accelerator in Miami—run by Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot of Backend Capital—marked a significant milestone. She even paused her formal education to focus entirely on her startup, though she plans to return to school later to study business.

According to her LinkedIn profile, she is the co-founder of Dash.