By: Sahil Sachdeva
Imagine summoning a voice assistant that responds instantly, even when your phone is offline. This is no longer science fiction; it’s the on-device AI revolution, and RunAnywhere is at its forefront. Founded by Sanchit Monga and Shubham Malhotra, the YC-backed startup is working to redefine the way voice experiences function by bringing AI directly to the device for greater speed, privacy, and reliability.
Why Voice AI Needs to Run on Devices
Voice is unforgiving. Users can easily notice delays, dropped wake words, or incomplete responses. Traditional cloud-based AI systems can sometimes face latency, connectivity issues, and privacy concerns, limitations that become especially visible in real-time interactions like voice.
The founders of RunAnywhere believe the future of voice AI lies in moving intelligence closer to the user. “Voice is one of the most challenging real-time AI problems,” the founders explain. “Every millisecond counts, and users expect it to just work.”
By enabling on-device AI, RunAnywhere aims to make voice interactions feel instantaneous and reliable. Processing data locally reduces the need to constantly send requests to the cloud, allowing applications to respond faster while also offering better protection of user data.
For enterprises building voice-enabled products, this shift provides a potential advantage: AI systems that can continue functioning smoothly even with limited connectivity, delivering more consistent performance in real-world environments.
The Killer App for Edge AI
RunAnywhere’s focus on voice is deliberate. Their platform supports always-on wake word detection, low-latency speech-to-text (ASR), and offline-capable large language models (LLMs) integrated into responsive voice agents. Users can interact naturally without worrying about cloud connectivity, while developers can benefit from operational control over deployment, updates, and monitoring.
Solving the Hard Problems Behind the Scenes
The voice interface makes it clear that the limitations of edge AI are hard to ignore: constrained memory, uneven hardware performance, and the operational burden of keeping models updated in the field. Sanchit and Shubham built RunAnywhere around this reality. Their view is simple: model quality alone is not enough, AI only becomes valuable when it can be shipped, managed, and improved reliably across real devices. That is why RunAnywhere combines an SDK with a control plane that handles deployment, updates, routing, and observability, allowing developers to focus on product experience rather than infrastructure pain.
Consumer Impact
For consumers, this approach has the potential to transform AI into a seamless companion. On-device voice agents may offer instant commands, offline dictation, and privacy-conscious interactions. Whether it’s controlling smart home devices, drafting messages, or accessing local content, RunAnywhere’s infrastructure works to make these interactions fast, private, and reliable.
The Journey to RunAnywhere
RunAnywhere was shaped by the distinct but highly complementary backgrounds of its founders. Sanchit, drawing on years in mobile development and experience at Intuit, saw how difficult it was to take AI beyond prototypes and make it work consistently on real devices. Shubham, through his work at Microsoft Azure and AWS, had operated in the world of large-scale infrastructure, observability, and distributed systems, where reliability and performance are critical. Together, they realized that the biggest barrier to edge AI adoption was not model capability alone, but the infrastructure required to deploy and manage those models in production. RunAnywhere emerged from that realization, a platform built to address the operational complexity of shipping AI reliably across mobile and embedded environments, and gained early validation through Y Combinator.
Future of Voice AI
RunAnywhere envisions a world where voice becomes the most natural interface, capable of offline reasoning, instant responses, and secure data handling. Shubham says, “The future default could be on-device first with the cloud as a fallback. Privacy, reliability, and latency may be considered features, not optional.”
Inspiring Builders Through Infrastructure
RunAnywhere Founder’s message to fellow builders is clear: hard, unglamorous infrastructure problems often open up entirely new product categories. “Constraints are not blockers; they’re design inputs. Solve for them, and you may enable experiences that feel effortless for users,” he explains. For voice AI, that means models that run locally, respond instantly, and respect user data, all while giving developers the tools to monitor, update, and optimize their fleets efficiently.
