EXCLUSIVE: Voice startup Wispr Flow has launched an AI lab to bring 'Jarvis' to life.

The maker of popular dictation tool Flow plans to hire up to 50 researchers, at a commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars, CEO Tanay Kothari tells Upstarts Media.

“We are actually now building the model that powers and gets to Jarvis,” Kothari says, invoking Tony Stark's fictional AI assistant (technically, 'J.A.R.V.I.S.').

The new Advanced Interfaces Lab, led by Amazon and Meta veteran Ariya Rastrow, who calls it the culmination of a career-long dream after working on Alexa's founding team.

"The keyboard is on its way out," adds co-founder and CTO Sahaj Garg.

With OpenAI president Greg Brockman saying his company is pursuing a similar goal, why can Wispr's new lab win? Read our full story here 👇

https://lnkd.in/gidgZRDP… more

I used to find value from LinkedIn posts when people manually wrote them only when they felt they were relevant. Instead, my feed is flooded with irrelevant AI gen content.

Connection requests are 100% the result of automation plus poor AI gen messages faking customization based on obvious info taken from my profile. TBH I thought AI was going to be smarter by now and really trick me into believing there's something innit for me if I hit the ACCEPT button.

I don't know about you but unless I get push up notifications from people I enjoy following, the only reason I open the LinkedIn app is to play games and check the scoreboard to see if I was able to beat John Peck, Charlie Heatherly, Fernando González Altés or Elijah Murray (sadly, I'm not! 🤣 Although LI says I keep crushing it). … more

The Ken is hiring a Desk Editor.

A few years ago, if you'd asked me what a Desk Editor did, I would've said, “They fix grammar, tighten structure, and write better headlines.”

All true. But that’s also the smaller part of the job here.

We want our desk editors to shape stories. They need to push the reporting, question assumptions and numbers, challenge lazy conclusions, and help reporters find the story hiding inside weeks of reporting. Sometimes that means asking for one more phone call. It means deleting 700 words because the story becomes stronger without them. In an age when everyone has access to AI, good editing is not more about polishing prose.

That’s the role we are hiring for.

At The Ken, we spend our time figuring out why something happened, who benefitted, who didn’t, and what everyone else missed, or didn’t tell. One day that could be India's AI ambitions. The next, a family business reinventing itself, a startup burning through capital, a regulator reshaping an industry, or a company making a bet that looks irrational from the outside.

And because The Ken has grown well beyond a single-story-a-day publication, the work isn't confined to one format. You will edit longform features, newsletters, and probably a few things we haven't (re)invented yet.

We are looking for someone based in Bengaluru. It's a genuinely fun place to work. Editorial sits alongside product, engineering, design, and marketing. The best conversations happen across teams, and good ideas aren't particularly respectful of org charts.

If this sounds like your kind of work, or you know someone who would be brilliant at it, drop me a message or email your CV to sumit (at) the-ken (dot) com

New Delhi-based B2B food-tech startup Urban Harvest is set to raise ₹341.4 crore (about $35.9 million) in a Series D round led by Info Edge India Ltd, with participation from Sandeep Kapadia, J&A Partners, and several other investors — bringing the total investor count to 58.

Founded in 2019 by Sidhantt Suri and Aastik Aggarwal, Urban Harvest operates as a B2B supply chain platform for the HoReCa (Hotel, Restaurant, Café) segment, delivering fresh produce and food ingredients directly to cloud kitchens and commercial restaurants — positioning itself against established players like Zomato's Hyperpure.

This fresh round marks one of the larger Series D raises in India's foodtech supply chain space this year, reflecting growing investor confidence in tech-enabled B2B food distribution as the sector continues to formalize and scale.

#UrbanHarvest #SeriesDFunding #FoodTech #StartupFunding #IndianStartups… more

I’m currently looking for a new opportunity as an SEO Manager.

With 12+ years of experience in SEO, I have worked across eCommerce, healthcare, finance, real estate, and other industries, helping businesses improve their organic visibility, traffic, and conversions.

My expertise includes:
Technical SEO
On-Page & Off-Page SEO
SEO Strategy & Execution
Website Migrations
Shopify & WordPress SEO
GA4 & Google Search Console
Team Leadership & Client Management
AI Search Optimisation (AEO/GEO)

I’m open to SEO Manager or Senior SEO Manager where I can contribute to business growth through data-driven SEO strategies.

If your organisation is hiring or you know of a suitable opportunity, I would greatly appreciate your support through a referral or by connecting me with the right people.

Thank you for your support!… more

A vendor tried to lock us into ₹10-15/min for a voice AI agent.

I rebuilt the whole thing for ₹5.5/min - then open-sourced it for free.

Here's the full story 👇

I spent months hunting for a voice-agent setup that was actually cost-effective. Every hosted provider ran the same play: easy signup, then the per-minute price quietly creeps toward ₹10-15/min. At a few thousand calls a month, that quietly eats the entire business case.

So I stopped trusting sales decks and asked builders instead - Reddit threads, DMs, people who'd shipped real phone agents.

The answer was always open source:

→ Pipecat is magic.
→ Self-host LiveKit and you own the whole pipeline.
→ Add Sarvam for Indian languages.
→ Telephony Vobiz AI for picking real call and phone numbers.

I built it end to end, ran it in production, and measured everything:

→ ~700ms – 1.2s real latency (measured, not marketing)
→ ≈₹5.50/min all-in - vs the ₹10 they wanted
→ English + Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam
→ Full docs: number, VPS, SIP wiring, call recordings, a live dashboard

Here's what most people still miss:

A voice agent isn't "a chatbot that talks" anymore. It's becoming the front desk of the business:

→ a consulting agent that qualifies leads before your calendar fills
→ a loan/equity agent that handles eligibility + doc follow-ups
→ a real-estate agent that books site visits at 11 PM

That level shouldn't cost ₹10-15/min. So I gave it away.

Repo's in the comments. Fork it, ship it.

If you had a voice agent answering every call today - which part of your business would you point it at first?

(And if you want one built for you, my DMs are open.)

#VoiceAI #AIAgents #OpenSource #ConversationalAI #BuildInPublic… more

This is exactly what happens when I present my product launch to the management :)

Relatable? share your stories.

Robot powered by Qualcomm’s new AI chip "The Dragonwing IQ10" collapsed mid-presentation.… more

For Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Delhi Only

Hi All. I’ve created a WhatsApp group where PR and Journalists can both find relevant opportunities. If you’re exploring opportunities—or want to expand your network—this is the right place.

🔗 Comment “ADD” or DM me to join.
Let’s grow together 🚀

#freelancers #jobseekers #whtsapgroup #linkedin… more

Nykaa told its investors it counted about 6,500 AI mentions in one month, and called itself #1 in beauty on ChatGPT and Gemini.

Earlier this year, Info Edge reported the only shrinking business it owns. An education arm whose traffic AI quietly took.

Seven Indian listed companies have now put AI search in their filings, and you would expect them to say the same thing. They are not even close.

Nykaa is winning, and it wants shareholders to know it. A filed deck, 979 topics tracked, and a line telling investors to pay close attention to AEO.

Info Edge is at the other end. It has blamed AI overviews for Shiksha's traffic loss, four quarters running. Last quarter that arm shrank almost 23%, the only part of the company that fell, while its marketplaces grew.

IndiaMART just stopped reporting its traffic number. Bots and agents had made it meaningless, so it dropped a figure it had published for years and wrote "LLM citations" into its annual report instead.

MakeMyTrip did the quietest thing. It slipped one sentence into a US regulatory filing: AI chatbots could reduce traffic to its platforms. That sentence was not there the year before.

Then there are the ones who think everyone else is panicking. CarTrade, asked about this three quarters running, pushed back every time: our traffic grew as AI search grew. Zomato's founder gave it a heading in his shareholder letter, "AI is our friend, not a threat."

What I cannot get past is that these are careful companies, lawyers on every line, and they still cannot agree on whether AI search helps them or hurts them. The only thing they agree on is that it is real, and it is here.

Your board will ask which of these companies you sound like before your SEO agency does. Right now, most marketing teams could not tell you.

#AEO #GEO #AISearch #IndiaBusiness… more

A founder applied to ORIGIN last week convinced their pitch was solid.

Clean deck.
Strong traction slide.
A confident answer for every question they'd rehearsed.

The evaluation came back and flagged something they hadn't rehearsed for.

Their customer acquisition cost was calculated as one flat number across all channels.
But 60% of their actual sales were high touch, direct outreach, meaning the real cost per customer was significantly higher than the slide showed.

Their moat slide cited two pending patents. Pending, not granted.
Any funded competitor could replicate the core mechanism within a year.

Their 24 month growth plan assumed adoption at a pace their own team's current bandwidth couldn't support.

None of this made the business unfundable.
It meant the founder walked into their next real investor meeting already knowing what would get challenged, instead of finding out in the room.

That's the entire point of ORIGIN.

5 complimentary institutional grade evaluations.
The same adversarial process real investment committees use.

279 spots remain.

Applications close 18 August.

Apply: zurvek.com/origin

https://lnkd.in/dp5ZsnnZ

#Zurvek #Startup #Fundraising #StartupIndia #ZurvekOrigin2K26… more