While most teenagers are busy preparing for exams, college forms, and the usual questions about what comes next, Pranjali Awasthi was already building a company in artificial intelligence. At 16, she founded Delv.AI, a startup designed to help researchers and enterprises find, extract, and summarise information from large volumes of complex data. The company later reached a valuation of about $12 million, nearly ₹100 crore, after attracting backing from investors in the startup ecosystem.
Awasthi’s story did not begin with the recent wave of excitement around artificial intelligence. Born in India, she moved to Florida at the age of 11. Her interest in technology started much earlier, shaped by a home environment where curiosity was encouraged. Guided by her engineer father, she began coding when she was just seven.
For Awasthi, computers were not just devices for entertainment. They became tools to build, test, and create. Early exposure to programming and competitive mathematics helped set the base for a path that would later move quickly into machine learning and startup building.
A key turning point came during the COVID-19 pandemic. At 13, Awasthi secured a virtual research internship at Florida International University. She spent nearly 20 hours a week working with adult researchers on machine learning models, data extraction, and literature reviews.
That experience helped her spot a problem many researchers knew too well. Important insights were often buried inside long academic papers, PDFs, databases, and scattered text sources. Finding the right information could take hours of manual work.
The release of OpenAI’s GPT-3 beta in 2020 gave her a clearer direction. Awasthi saw how machine learning could be used to reduce the time spent searching through fragmented data. In January 2022, at 16, she launched Delv.AI with the aim of helping users extract and summarise information from complex datasets more quickly.
The startup gained early attention during Miami Hack Week, where Awasthi connected with tech entrepreneurs Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot of Backend Capital. That meeting helped her enter HF0, a residency accelerator based in San Francisco and Miami.
Delv.AI also gained visibility after its beta launch on Product Hunt. As the company began to grow, Awasthi took a temporary break from high school to focus on scaling the startup.
Investors soon came in. Delv.AI raised around $450,000, estimated between ₹3.7 crore and ₹4.2 crore, from funds including Village Global, On Deck, and Angel List Quant Fund. The funding helped push the company’s valuation to the nearly ₹100 crore mark.
The platform works around a clear research problem: too much information, too little time. Delv.AI brings together academic papers, enterprise PDFs, and online text sources into one interface. It then helps users ask specific questions, pull out key data points, and reduce the need for manual reading.
The product also includes data visualisation features such as AI-powered heatmaps, treemaps, and pie charts, making dense information easier to understand at a glance.
Awasthi’s journey has continued beyond Delv.AI. In March 2025, she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has also co-founded Salshy, an AI-powered automated email and digital executive assistant described as “ChatGPT with hands.”
From learning to code as a child to building an AI company as a teenager, Pranjali Awasthi’s journey reflects how early curiosity, technical exposure, and a clearly identified problem can come together to create a serious startup story.
At its heart, Delv.AI was built around a simple idea: make research faster, cleaner, and less painful for people working with large amounts of information. That idea, backed by early investor confidence, turned a teenage founder’s observation into a company valued at nearly ₹100 crore.
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