Startup Deep Dive : Two Platforms — the Samsung avatar dream that became a Jio-backed multilingual AI bet

Pranav Mistry spent the 2010s building holographic “digital humans” for Samsung, avatars meant to greet shoppers at ATMs and read the news from a living-room screen. When he raised his first outside capital in February 2022, it was not for that vision. It was $15 million from Reliance Jio for a 25% stake in a Silicon Valley company still describing itself as an “artificial reality” startup, TWO.

Three years on, TWO has quietly shelved the holograms. It now sells a small number of large enterprises AI language models under the brand Sutra, and says it will close 2025 on a $20 million annual revenue run rate, built on roughly ten big clients rather than the mass-market avatars Mistry once promised. A company pitched as the future of digital presence has, for now, become a business of translation.

Quick facts

What they do

Two Platforms, which does business as TWO or TWO AI, builds Sutra, a family of AI language models designed to work well in Indian and Asian languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Korean and Japanese, instead of treating English as the default and everything else as an afterthought. It licenses Sutra through an API to a short list of large enterprises in telecom, banking and retail, and gives away a free consumer chatbot, ChatSUTRA, mainly to build a public track record for the underlying models rather than to earn money directly.

The origin

Mistry’s founding insight was less about a new algorithm than a gap he had watched from inside Samsung: almost every leading language model of the early 2020s was trained English-first, yet most of the world’s internet users do not think, search or type in English. Before starting TWO, Mistry had built an unusual, presence-heavy career. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Gujarat University, a master’s in design from IIT Bombay, and a PhD from MIT’s Media Lab, where he worked in the Fluid Interfaces group under Pattie Maes and created SixthSense, a wearable gesture-interface project that won him Popular Science’s Inventor of the Year in 2009 and a spot on MIT Technology Review’s TR35 list the following year. Samsung hired him as director of research in 2012; he helped unveil the Galaxy Gear smartwatch in September 2013 and, in October 2019, was named president and CEO of Samsung’s STAR Labs, where he fronted Neon, the company’s “artificial human” project shown at CES 2020. He left in 2021 to start his own company around the same instinct: build AI that feels present and native, but this time sell it as software rather than as a research demo.

The struggle years

The company’s early years are a case study in betting on the wrong shape of the same idea, twice. TWO incorporated in July 2021 as an “artificial reality” company, a label that tied it directly to Mistry’s Samsung-era fascination with holographic, avatar-based interfaces. When it took its first outside money in February 2022 — $15 million from Reliance Jio for a 25% stake, alongside South Korea’s Naver Corp in the same round — press coverage at the time described it as a bet on “metaverse AI,” a category built around exactly the immersive-avatar vision Mistry had carried out of Samsung.

That bet came due at a bad time. Through 2022 and 2023, metaverse spending fell out of favour industry-wide, most visibly when Meta itself began redirecting its own metaverse investment toward large language models. TWO had raised money as a metaverse-adjacent “artificial reality” startup right as that entire investment thesis was cooling, with no named commercial avatar product to show for two and a half years of funded work. The company only resurfaced with a shipped, revenue-relevant product in March 2024 — and it was not an avatar. It was Sutra, a text-based multilingual language model, a full pivot in output even though the “artificial reality” branding lingered in some materials.

The turning point

The hinge is 28 March 2024, when Two Platforms unveiled Sutra to the public. Before that date, the company had ₹0 in publicly known enterprise revenue and no named commercial customers, three years and roughly $20 million into its life, on the record only as a metaverse-era “artificial reality” bet that had not yet shipped. After it, the change was fast by the company’s own account. By November 2024, ChatSUTRA, the free consumer chatbot built on Sutra, had drawn more than 600,000 unique users, and Mistry told reporters the company had generated about $4 million in revenue in that quarter alone, with named enterprise clients including Jio in India and Shinhan Bank and Samsung SDS in South Korea. A three-year pre-revenue research bet became, within about eight months of the Sutra launch, a company reporting an eight-figure annualised revenue run rate.

The money behind it

• February 2022: Reliance Jio invests $15 million (about ₹144 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) for a 25% stake in Two Platforms Inc, described at the time as a deep-tech “artificial reality” startup.
• Same round, February 2022: South Korea’s Naver Corp joins as a co-investor; the combined round is reported at $20 million total from the two backers.
• Implied valuation: roughly $60 million post-money as of February 2022, calculated directly from Jio’s disclosed $15 million-for-25% terms — no independently reported valuation figure exists beyond this arithmetic.
• What each backer changed: Jio gave TWO distribution into India’s largest telecom and retail customer base and became a named enterprise client of Sutra itself; Naver gave it a foothold and credibility in South Korea, where the company now lists Shinhan Bank and Samsung SDS as customers.
• Mid-2025: the company said it was raising a further $35-50 million growth round to fund expansion into Japan, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, as reported by Forbes India in June 2025 — no completion of this round, or any resulting valuation, has been publicly confirmed since.

How it makes money

Two Platforms is built around a small number of high-value contracts rather than a wide self-serve customer base. “We don’t need 100 customers,” Mistry told Analytics India Magazine in November 2024, “we need 10 good customers.”

• Money in: enterprise licensing contracts, averaging about $1 million in annual contract value each, sold to roughly ten large customers rather than volume API traffic (as per Forbes India, June 2025).
• Published API pricing for smaller-scale or developer use: Sutra-Pro and Sutra-Online at $1 per million tokens, Sutra-Light at $0.75 per million tokens; enterprise deals are priced separately and are not published (DeepLearning.AI, June 2024).
• ChatSUTRA, the free consumer chatbot, is a distribution and proof-of-quality layer rather than a revenue line — no monetisation for it has been disclosed.
• Costs: model training runs out of Silicon Valley, with inference served from clusters in India, South Korea and the United States, and planned expansion to Japan, Singapore and the Middle East (Forbes India, June 2025) — a compute-heavy cost base typical of companies that train their own foundation models, though no cost figures are disclosed.
• Where the margin is meant to sit: bespoke, high-touch enterprise deals rather than high-volume, low-margin API calls — the reverse of the consumer-scale approach used by OpenAI or Anthropic.
• What people get wrong: because of Mistry’s Samsung Neon history, Two Platforms is still often described in coverage as a “metaverse” or “holographic avatar” company. By 2024 its actual, revenue-generating product is a text-and-voice language-model API business, not an avatar platform.

The numbers

Two Platforms Inc. is a US-incorporated private company. It does not file audited accounts with India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs, has not disclosed a multi-year revenue or profit history, and there is no stock-exchange filing to draw on. The only figures on record come from Mistry’s own statements to reporters, so the table below shows exactly those data points, clearly labelled as company-stated rather than audited, and no earlier years are filled in because none are publicly verifiable.

Every figure in that table is a forward target or a single self-reported quarter, not an audited outcome, which is a meaningfully weaker evidence base than the multi-year filings available for most Indian startups covered in this format.

Where the money comes from

• Geography today: India and South Korea are the only two markets where Two Platforms names live customers — Jio in India; Shinhan Bank and Samsung SDS in South Korea (Analytics India Magazine, November 2024).
• Planned expansion: Japan, Singapore and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East (via Doha), tied to the inference-infrastructure build-out described in June 2025 (Forbes India).
• Customer type: enterprise-only revenue — telecom, banking, retail — with no disclosed self-serve consumer revenue line; ChatSUTRA, at over 600,000 users as of November 2024, is free.
• The surprise: the company’s single largest disclosed customer, Jio, is also its lead investor and roughly 25% shareholder — an unusual related-party concentration for a company presenting “10 good customers” as arm’s-length market validation.

The risks

• Customer-and-investor concentration: Reliance Jio is simultaneously a roughly 25% shareholder and Two Platforms’ most visible named customer. If Jio’s own AI strategy shifts toward in-house models or a rival vendor, both the revenue line and a quarter of the cap table sit exposed to one relationship (Business Standard, February 2022; Forbes India, June 2025).
• Better-funded, more focused competition: Indian rival Sarvam AI has raised about $50 million from Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed and Peak XV and ships its own India-tuned language models (Bloomberg, February 2026), while OpenAI, Google and Meta have all added deeper Indian-language support to their mainstream models, narrowing the language-specialisation gap Two Platforms is built on.
• Unverified scale and financial claims: nearly every revenue, user and ARR figure attached to Two Platforms comes from Mistry’s own statements to press rather than audited filings or independent verification. The $35-50 million growth round flagged in mid-2025 has no confirmed close as of this piece, and a claim reported by Forbes India in June 2025 that the company’s models reach “500 million users” through enterprise deployments is a company estimate, not an audited or independently confirmed figure — it is not repeated in this piece as fact.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson sits in the gap between Mistry’s signature idea and the business that finally made money. He built his public reputation on presence: SixthSense, Galaxy Gear, Neon, and then an “artificial reality” startup chasing the same holographic instinct with venture money behind it. None of that shipped a paying product for three years. What did was something narrower and less cinematic — an API that answers a customer in their own language, sold to ten large accounts instead of the world. A founder’s signature idea is not automatically the company’s business model, and the founders who survive are often the ones willing to let the flashier version of their vision go quiet while the plainer, sellable version ships.

Frequently asked questions

What does Two Platforms actually sell?

Its main product is Sutra, a family of multilingual AI language models licensed to enterprises through an API, alongside a free consumer chatbot called ChatSUTRA and a voice-to-voice model called Sutra HiFi, launched in November 2024.

Who founded Two Platforms and when?

Pranav Mistry, formerly president and CEO of Samsung’s STAR Labs, founded it in July 2021 in Silicon Valley.

How much money has Two Platforms raised?

It raised $20 million in February 2022 from Reliance Jio ($15 million for a 25% stake) and South Korea’s Naver Corp. As of June 2025 it was seeking a further $35-50 million growth round, with no completion publicly confirmed since.

Is Two Platforms profitable?

No. As of mid-2025 the company was targeting about $20 million in annualised revenue by the end of 2025 and had set a goal of reaching profitability by 2026-27, both self-reported targets rather than audited outcomes.

Is Two Platforms the same company as the AI-avatar startup “Beyond Presence”?

No. Beyond Presence is a separate, Europe-based real-time AI avatar company with no reported ownership or operating link to Two Platforms or Pranav Mistry; the two are unrelated businesses that both work in AI-driven digital interaction.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Business Standard, “Jio acquires 25% stake in deep-tech start-up Two Platforms for $15 million,” February 2022
• Voicebot.ai, “Indian Telecom Jio Spends $15M for 25% of Former Samsung Exec’s Metaverse Startup,” February 2022
• Wikipedia, “Pranav Mistry,” accessed September 2026
• DeepLearning.AI, The Batch, “Startup Two AI Launches SUTRA, A Multilingual Model for South Asian Markets,” June 2024
• Analytics India Magazine, “Meet the Indian AI Startup Quietly Taking Over the Enterprise World,” November 2024
• Analytics India Magazine, “Jio-Backed TWO AI Launches Multilingual Voice Model Sutra HiFi,” November 2024
• Forbes India, “Pranav Mistry: It’s time to build value-driven AI models to transform industries, daily life,” June 2025
• Tracxn, “TWO — Company Profile, Team, Funding & Competitors,” accessed September 2026
• Bloomberg, “Upstart Sarvam Unveils AI Model Customized for India Market,” February 2026
• Beyondpresence.ai, company website, accessed September 2026

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