Kian Hooshmand

Kian Hooshmand is a San Francisco-based startup founder and the former co-founder of Vocode, an open-source voice artificial intelligence platform. Before launching his own venture, he gained professional experience working at the financial technology company Brex and completed his higher education at the University of California, Berkeley. Hooshmand established Vocode alongside Ajay Raj in 2023, subsequently participating in Y Combinator's Winter 2023 cohort to accelerate the development of their conversational AI infrastructure. Under his leadership, the developer tool company successfully secured a $3.0 million seed funding round in February 2024, attracting capital from prominent institutional investors including Kindred Ventures and AngelList. The financing also included participation from notable individual angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Scott Belsky, and Amjad Masad. His professional background centers on building scalable developer tools and advancing open-source conversational artificial intelligence technologies.