Voice AI Deal: Competitive Analysis and Financial Due Diligence

Nishanth took on a voice AI deal involving a Mumbai-based company working on visual dubbing and lip-sync technology. Before the team committed to the mandate, he ran a full sector sweep: mapping the competitive landscape, understanding funding histories across comparable companies, and sizing the market across the BFSI and OTT segments.

His competitive analysis surfaced two underdeveloped opportunities the company had not fully articulated. The BFSI segment was generating the largest revenue pools for voice AI players, and the OTT dubbing use case, where AI lip-sync could replace on-set dubbing at a fraction of the cost, was an emerging wedge the company was already positioned to exploit. The company had already signed a deal with Dharma Productions and was in early conversations with other OTT platforms. These two segments became the core of the pitch story.

Once a VC expressed interest, Nishanth moved into financial due diligence, where he identified three material issues. First, the top ten customers accounted for roughly 90% of the company's revenue, a concentration risk that needed to be disclosed and contextualized for the diligence team. Second, a portion of the company's technology was licensed from overseas vendors, and the cross-border transactions in USD and GBP had not been fully reflected in GST and FEMA filings, creating a compliance exposure that needed to be addressed before closing.

The third issue was the most consequential for the investment case. The company's OTT contracts were structured in short per-minute increments, typically 20 to 30 minutes per deal, rather than full-series agreements. When Nishanth mapped the actual pipeline against the projected revenue jump, the contracts did not support the numbers. He flagged the gap, and the team worked with the founders to rebuild the financial projections on the basis of what the signed pipeline could actually deliver.