Maya Research, an AI startup building voice interface technology, has raised $1.9 million in a seed funding round led by South Park Commons. Founded in 2025 by BS Dheemanth Reddy and Bharath Kumar Kakumani, Maya is building a voice interface for people who interact with technology through conversation rather than typing, tapping, and navigating complex interfaces. Its open-source voice model, called Maya 1, was released under the Apache 2.0 licence and currently holds a Quality Elo score of 1,051 on Speech Arena, placing it sixth among open-weight voice models globally. Maya Research claims that it is currently the only Indian company listed on Speech Arena. Maya Research’s models have crossed 440,000 downloads on Hugging Face, and the company's consumer application has been downloaded more than 3 million times across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa region.