From corporate strategy to deep-tech: ZWAG AI founder on building language-aware AI
Priya M. Nair, co-founder of ZWAG AI, described her move from corporate leadership to deep-tech entrepreneurship and her company's Mātṛ model for addressing language bias in AI.
Nair said her career started with the UAE Air Force and Air Defence, followed by 11 years in strategy and growth at an American engineering and programme management firm. She said she turned to entrepreneurship during the Covid-19 pandemic, seeking a way to use her skills in leadership, strategy and communications.
Nair said fundraising had been the main challenge, as she worked to convince investors that a non-technical founder and a woman leading a deep-tech company were not a disadvantage. She said referrals and networking, built over years, helped the company close its recent pre-seed round.
Co-founded with Nipuna Abeykoon, ZWAG AI developed Mātṛ to address bias in large AI models trained mainly on English and a few widely represented languages. The company says the model identifies where languages diverge and adjusts AI interpretations at inference time, without retraining existing systems. Its Linguistics Intelligence Platform covers 2,331 languages, and the company plans to extend it beyond 5,000.