Who is Pranjali Awasthi? A 16-year-old who built a Rs 100 crore AI startup

Discover how Pranjali Awasthi, a 16-year-old Indian-origin prodigy, built Delv.AI—an AI startup valued at nearly Rs 100 crore ($12 million). Learn about her inspiring journey from coding at age 7 to securing venture capital backing.

Jun 15, 2026, 20:08 IST

A young entrepreneur is demonstrating that age is not a barrier to creativity in the realm of artificial intelligence by transforming industries and generating billion-dollar opportunities. Meet Pranjali Awasthi an Indian computer prodigy who turned her love of coding into Delv.AI an AI-powered firm that is reputedly worth close to ₹100 crore.

Pranjali founded Delv.AI, an artificial intelligence startup that quickly scaled to a valuation of nearly Rs 100 crore ($12 million) at just 16 years old which is backed by Silicon Valley accelerators and prominent venture capitalists.

Who is Pranjali Awasthi?

Pranjali Awasthi is a tech prodigy data scientist and the CEO-founder of Delv.AI. Born in India and later moving to Florida, USA, at age 11 her trajectory was heavily influenced by an environment steeped in technological curiosity.

Pranjali's coding journey began at the tender age of seven. She was encouraged by her father an engineer who treated computers as tools for building rather than mere entertainment. She mastered programming languages and competitive mathematics early on.

The world was shifting to remote operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic by the time she turned 13,. Capitalizing on virtual schooling. Pranjali secured a virtual Research Internship at Florida International University (FIU) working 20 hours a week alongside researchers twice her age. She immersed herself in machine learning models, data extraction and literature reviews.

It was during her time at the FIU research labs she recognized a massive bottleneck in search engines that were inefficient at pinpointing exact data buried within vast seas of academic literature, PDFs and scattered online content.

OpenAI released its GPT-3 beta in 2020. Pranjali saw an opportunity to bridge the gap. In January 2022, at age 16. She launched Delv.AI to eliminate data silos and assist researchers, analysts and enterprises in instantly extracting and summarizing specific information.

Pranjali's breakthrough came during Miami Hack Week where she caught the attention of tech luminaries Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot of Backend Capital. This encounter earned her a coveted spot in the Hacker Fellowship (HF0), a live-in startup accelerator in San Francisco and Miami.

Pranjali launched Delv.AI's beta on Product Hunt where it achieved immediate viral success taking a temporary leave of absence from high school to focus on her vision.

Her pitches during Demo Day attracted massive confidence from the venture capital ecosystem. Delv.AI quickly secured roughly $450,000 (approx. Rs 3.7 to 4.2 crore) in funding from heavyweights including Village Global (an early-stage venture fund backed by tech titans like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos), On Deck and Angel List Quant Fund. The startup's valuation soared to $12 million (nearly Rs 100 crore). 

What does Delv.AI actually do?

Delv.AI operates in the highly competitive space of AI-driven text analytics and knowledge management Delv.AI utilizes advanced machine learning to 

  • Eliminate Data Silos aggregates diverse online text sources, academic papers and enterprise PDFs into a unified interface.

  • Quick summarization extracts core insights and answers specific user queries without requiring manual reading.

  • Data visualisation a platform dynamically generates AI-driven graphical tools like heatmaps, treemaps and pie charts to help users interpret data at a glance.

  • Pranjali's entrepreneurial journey did not end with Delv.AI. She earned her Bachelor of Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in March 2025. She expanded her portfolio by co-founding Salshy an AI-powered automated email and digital executive assistant known as ChatGPT with hands.

    Pranjali's amazing climb has captivated global attention since she began coding at the age of seven and interned in machine learning research labs as a teenager. Her journey is about more than simply founding a successful AI company; it is also about vision, determination, and how the next generation of innovators is defining the future of technology.

    AI startups are still making news all around the world. Pranjali Awasthi stands out as one of the youngest founders making a significant contribution to the artificial intelligence revolution.

    Manisha Waldia

    Executive - Editorial

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