#261 Finding Product-Market Fit in Language AI with Naitiv Founder Gayatri Shahane

Gayatri Shahane, Founder and CEO of early-stage startup Naitiv, joins SlatorPod to talk about her entrepreneurial journey and building a conversational AI tool for business communication.

Gayatri describes how Naitiv’s conversational AI agent is built as a desktop app to manage latency and audio challenges in live interpretation. She explains that it supports different conversation modes for casual and professional contexts, with a voice orchestration engine developed to handle turn-taking, speaker overlaps, and multiple languages.

The Founder recalls testing the technology in live Discord language-learning channels, where she conversed with Spanish, Korean, and Japanese speakers who often did not realize they were speaking with an AI.

She highlights that her early adopters include B2B companies expanding into Asia, Latin America, and Europe, using the platform for sales, onboarding, and critical client meetings. 

Gayatri acknowledges the competitive market in real-time AI interpreting, but believes there is space for smaller, more specialized tools. She adds that marketing has so far been founder-led and organic.

Gayatri concludes by sharing her plans to raise a pre-seed round and evolve Naitiv beyond meetings into a full AI agent.