SmartSphere Technologies, a startup from Cohort 12 at the National Incubation Center Karachi, has won third prize in the Future of Voice Artificial Intelligence Challenge, powered by ElevenLabs. The challenge drew 9,800 applicants, which makes the placement a strong result for a Karachi company. The center said it is proud of the achievement, and the startup’s founder, Rakhshan Zulfiqar, who holds a doctorate in artificial intelligence, shared the news along with the story of her week in Dubai.
The same week, Rakhshan Zulfiqar presented on the Innovation Stage at the Dubai AI Festival in front of government representatives and industry leaders. She described standing there as a founder, after months of building, as a moment she will not forget. A place on a stage at a festival of that size gives a young company a direct line to the buyers and officials who decide which technology gets adopted in the region, and it brings the startup in front of customers who are hard to reach from Pakistan.
SmartSphere builds multilingual voice artificial intelligence that handles real business conversations. Its agents answer calls, follow up with customers, and resolve requests, so that teams spend less time on repetitive calls and customers get a faster and better experience. The company’s agents work across calls, messaging on WhatsApp, the web, and social channels, in more than 26 languages, with a live dashboard that shows what is happening. Voice agents of this kind are in demand in banking, insurance, retail, and other businesses that handle large numbers of customer calls, and support for many languages matters in markets where customers switch between several.
Rakhshan Zulfiqar said the result tells her the company is building the right thing and that it raises the bar. She thanked ElevenLabs, the organizers, the mentors, and the team, whom she credited for the long nights spent preparing the demonstration. The next step, she said, is to turn the result into real deployments with customers, and she invited businesses that run on customer conversations to get in touch and see what the technology looks like in practice. The announcement did not give the prize amount or the details of the judging, but it makes clear that the startup is now moving from competition to commercial use.
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