Coding at 7, CEO at 16: Inside Pranjali Awasthi’s 100 crore AI journey

While most 16-year-olds were navigating high school exams and college applications, Pranjali Awasthi was pitching venture capitalists and building an artificial intelligence company. Driven by a childhood passion for programming, she founded Delv.AI, a startup that quickly attracted major Silicon Valley backers and reached a valuation of $12 million, or nearly ₹100 crore.

Her journey began long before the current artificial intelligence boom. Born in India, Awasthi moved to Florida at age 11, raised in an environment that fostered deep curiosity. Guided by her engineer father, she began coding at just seven years old, learning to view computers as tools for creation rather than entertainment. Early exposure to programming languages and competitive mathematics laid the foundation for her technical trajectory.

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The pivotal shift occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. At age 13, Awasthi secured a virtual research internship at Florida International University, committing roughly 20 hours a week to working alongside adult researchers on machine learning models, data extraction, and literature reviews. During this time, she noticed a recurring bottleneck: researchers spent hours manually hunting for specific insights buried within massive collections of academic papers, PDFs, and databases.

The launch of OpenAI’s GPT-3 beta in 2020 provided the missing piece of the puzzle, convincing her that machine learning could solve this data fragmentation problem. In January 2022, at 16, Awasthi officially launched Delv.AI to help enterprises and researchers instantly extract and summarize information from complex datasets.

“ChatGPT with hands”

The startup gained rapid traction during Miami Hack Week, where Awasthi caught the attention of tech entrepreneurs Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot of Backend Capital. The encounter secured her a spot in HF0, a residency accelerator based in San Francisco and Miami. Following a highly successful beta launch on Product Hunt, Awasthi made the decision to take a temporary break from high school to scale her operation.

Funding and technical framework

Investors moved quickly to back the young founder. Delv.AI secured approximately $450,000 (between ₹3.7 crore and ₹4.2 crore) from prominent funds including Village Global, On Deck, and Angel List Quant Fund, driving the company’s valuation to the ₹100 crore milestone.

Today, Delv.AI operates as an advanced text analytics and knowledge management platform designed to streamline research workflows through three core functions:

Data Aggregation: Consolidating academic papers, enterprise PDFs, and online text sources into a single user interface.

Insight Extraction: Answering specific queries and pulling key data points to eliminate manual reading.

Data Visualization: Generating AI-powered heatmaps, treemaps, and pie charts to make complex information easy to interpret at a glance.

Awasthi has continued to expand her footprint in the tech ecosystem. In March 2025, she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has since co-founded Salshy, an AI-powered automated email and digital executive assistant described as “ChatGPT with hands.” As artificial intelligence continues to reshape global industries, Awasthi remains one of the youngest founders driving tangible innovation in the ecosystem.