Rakesh Utekar

When Rakesh Utekar moved to Seattle for graduate school, he found himself living with roommates from South India who spoke Telugu—a language he didn’t understand. “I really wanted to solve that communication gap between us,” he says. 

Rather than let the barrier persist, he built a solution: a real-time speech-to-speech translation system that rendered their conversations as English directly in his AirPods. The project captured what drives Rakesh’s approach, that “AI is the bridge from vision and ideas to the real world.”

As a Technical Builder at AI Fund, Rakesh brings his full-stack AI capabilities across voice, language models, and retrieval systems. “There is nothing stopping you right now when AI is there,” he says.

Rakesh began his career as a machine learning engineer building chatbots and working on speech-to-text and text-to-speech models for multiple languages. After earning his bachelor’s in computer engineering from the University of Mumbai, he came to the US for his master’s in computer science with a data science specialization at Seattle University. His research focused on real-time applications at the intersection of AI and human communication, including sign language to speech translation.

After graduating, Rakesh moved to San Francisco and immersed himself in the startup ecosystem. His technical work has spanned multiple domains: he built a RAG pipeline that achieved 92% accuracy when competitors were managing 60-70%, designed low-latency workflows for metadata tagging, and implemented speech-to-speech translation for a video-conferencing app.