Coding at 7, CEO at 16: Inside Pranjali Awasthi's ₹100-crore AI journey

While many teenagers focus on school and social life, Pranjali Awasthi has been making waves in the tech industry, pitching to investors and leading her own artificial intelligence startup. At just 16, she launched Delv.AI, which quickly garnered the interest of major Silicon Valley investors, achieving a valuation close to $12 million, equivalent to approximately ₹100 crore. Awasthi's passion for programming ignited at the age of seven, inspired by her engineer father. Born in India and later relocating to Florida at age 11, she was immersed in a nurturing environment that encouraged her curiosity. Her early experiences with coding and competitive mathematics laid a solid foundation for her future in technology. The turning point in her journey came during the COVID-19 pandemic. At just 13 years old, she landed a virtual research internship at Florida International University, dedicating around 20 hours weekly to collaborate with seasoned researchers on projects involving machine learning and data analysis. It was during this time that she identified a significant challenge: researchers often struggled to extract useful information from vast collections of academic resources. The release of OpenAI’s GPT-3 in 2020 sparked a revelation for Awasthi, convincing her that machine learning could address these data retrieval issues. In January 2022, she officially launched Delv.AI, a platform designed to help businesses and researchers quickly access and summarize critical information from intricate datasets. Her startup gained momentum during Miami Hack Week, where she impressed tech leaders Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot of Backend Capital. This recognition led to her participation in HF0, a residency accelerator in San Francisco and Miami. Following a successful beta launch on Product Hunt, Awasthi made the bold choice to pause her high school education to focus on scaling her startup. Investors were quick to support this young entrepreneur, with Delv.AI raising around $450,000 (between ₹3.7 crore and ₹4.2 crore) from notable funds such as Village Global, On Deck, and Angel List Quant Fund, propelling her company's valuation to the ₹100 crore mark. Delv.AI has emerged as a sophisticated text analytics and knowledge management platform, offering three key functionalities: Data Aggregation, which consolidates various sources into one interface; Insight Extraction, which streamlines data retrieval; and Data Visualization, providing intuitive AI-generated graphics for easier comprehension of complex data. Awasthi's journey continues to unfold. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in March 2025 and has co-founded Salshy, an AI-driven digital assistant known as "ChatGPT with hands." As the AI landscape evolves, Awasthi stands out as one of the youngest innovators steering impactful advancements in technology.