Apoorv Singh

I'm 19. Born in Varanasi, in Bangalore the last few years, headed to San Francisco soon on an O-1. I never went to college; I'd been building things long enough by then that stopping for a few more years of lectures didn't make sense.

These days I'm an AI scientist and research engineer at Smallest. Most of my time goes into Pulse, our speech-to-text — one of the fastest STTs in the world per Artificial Analysis. I'm one of the primary researchers on it and built our foundational realtime variant, which now sits among the best realtime STTs out there. On the scale side, I recently took Pulse Pro from around 4 concurrent streams on a single GPU to 150+ in production for one of our enterprise customers. The rest of my time is on Hydra: a full-duplex, asynchronous-thinking speech-to-speech model — where turn-taking and thought start to blur into the same thing.

The first thing I built that mattered was an NLP-powered Discord bot, at 14, for COVID awareness. By 15 it was sitting at 500K users and carrying a Discord verification badge — I'd registered it under my dad's ID because I was too young to hold the account myself. I shut it down once COVID wound down; the job was done. Along the way I reverse-engineered Discord to host self-bots (three accounts banned in the process), which is how I picked up Go in the first place.

Also at 15: Minima, a Go web framework. Express-shaped on the outside; roughly 50× faster underneath. About 150 stars on its own, and last I checked still running in production at a handful of companies.

A few years inside crypto followed. Core team at Saturn. A $50K grant from Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon co-founder) on a project that didn't pan out. I won Unfold twice — India's largest multichain hackathon — and a long string of regional ones across that stretch, youngest in the room each time. About $65K in grants and prizes by the end of it.

Hardware took up most of 16 to 18, mostly lab time when I should have been in class. A small-form ventilator. A network-wide exhaust-monitoring and filtering simulation for two-wheelers that read tailpipe output and cleaned it inline. A pair of glasses for the blind that ran a camera through realtime scene transcription. Some of it placed at national fairs; most of it I just wanted to see if I could build.

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Around the same stretch, two of India's largest student competitions — Youth Ideathon and the CBSE Science Exhibition, each with more than 150K participants. I'm still the only person to podium at both. Winning Youth Ideathon also got me into a room of five kids presenting edtech work to Narendra Modi.

The same year, I made the Nailwal Fellowship shortlist — $100K to drop out and go full-time on web3. I had a few months of high school left and didn't want to skip the ending for a pivot I wasn't sure I wanted. (Never ended up going to college anyway.)

Also at 17: Connect AI. A Jarvis-shaped human–computer interface — language in, action out across a full machine. The launch pulled 500K views in a day on Twitter; inbound from Peak XV, Sierra, Nexus, and Gradient; warm notes from the founders of Loom and Gumroad. It never quite resolved into a business, so I shelved it. The bones of it are coming back this year for something larger.

WTFund a little after that: top 3% of applicants on an idea I started the night before the deadline. I built the whole product over the application window — a fully async AI web handler for white-collar browser tasks, with a few small models I trained for it. Got cut at the end for being too early, which I'll take.

Then a year at HeyPixa, 18 to 19, on voice research. I built the data pipelines that produced more than 500K hours of training audio, and ran the post-training and final SFTs for Luna — one of the first foundational models to come out of India, and a speech-to-speech model at that. Pixa ships to UK stores this year.

San Francisco, soon, on an O-1.

In the meantime, writing — a couple of workshop papers and some conference work on the way. Past that, I want to get back into full-duplex systems and hardware.

If you want to hack around on any of this, hit me up.