Pranjali Awasthi: The Young AI Startup Founder Valued at ₹100 Crore

For those who have grown up with the dream of creating, no struggle seems too big and no boundary too difficult to cross. For Pranjali Awasthi, she was just seven when her father, an engineer introduced her to computer science. According to her, he believes that computer science is a course that should be taught alongside other programs in schools.

A budding entrepreneur

At the age of 11, when her family moved to Florida, her curiosity to take computer science classes and do competitive math thrived. When she turned 13, she began interning in university research labs at Florida Internal University working on machine learning projects with her high school going virtual due to the pandemic. Awasthi interned for 20 hours a week, working on searches, extracting data and creating literature reviews. "In 2020, OpenAI released its ChatGPT-3 beta, and I knew we could use it to make extracting and summarising research data easier," she told Business Insider. As a research intern herself, she knew how difficult it was to find exactly what you need on search engines. It was the thought of solving this problem that laid the seed of her company in her mind. In 2021, she attended a Miami Hack Week where she met Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot, partners at Backend Capital. They had also founded HFO residency, a live-in startup accelerator in San Francisco and Miami. She got accepted into their 12-week cohort in exchange for a small piece of her future company. "My parents told me I should take the opportunity – the network alone would be worth it, so I took an absence from high school. The residency paid for me to commute back and forth to the house via Uber every day," she shared. There, she launched the beta for Delv.AI on Product Hunt, a platform for people to share software for free, at the mere age of 15. When she presented her project on Demo Day, she received her first investment through On Deck and Village Global. Soon, she raised $45,000 in funds and angels. Today, her company is valued at nearly ₹100 crore, making her one of the youngest founder to build a fast-growing AI startup. Alongside, she completed her Bachelor of Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. In March 2025, she also became the co-founder of Salshy, an AI-powered email assistant and automation platform designed to act as your digital executive assistant, also called a "ChatGPT with hands." She also shared that as a young founder, she found that people were more inclined to help her or answer questions. However, there were also those who looked down at her, literally and figuratively. "We're dealing with a flood of new AI products – the competition is insane. In 2021, in Miami, everyone was talking about crypto. By the end of 2022, that had changed completely to AI," she said in the 2023 interview. Now, she aims to keep on building new things and simplifying life.