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

The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Two Platforms.

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

Company Two Platforms Inc. (trades as TWO / TWO AI; product brand Sutra)
Founded July 2021, Silicon Valley, California
Founder(s) Pranav Mistry (Founder and CEO)
Businesses Sutra multilingual AI models (enterprise API), ChatSUTRA (consumer chatbot), Sutra HiFi (voice model)
Latest disclosed revenue About $4 million in a single quarter (reported, Q4 2024); targeting $20 million ARR by end of 2025 (company-stated)
Latest profit/loss Not disclosed; company targets profitability by 2026-27
Listed Private — no IPO
Market value / last valuation About $60 million implied (February 2022, calculated from Jio’s disclosed stake); no later valuation publicly confirmed
Key shareholders / CEO Pranav Mistry (Founder & CEO); Reliance Jio (about 25%); Naver Corp

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

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.”

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.

Period Revenue (₹ crore) Profit / loss
Q4 2024 (reported quarterly revenue) About ₹38 crore (~$4 million) Not disclosed
FY2025 (year-end target, company-stated) About ₹192 crore (~$20 million) annualised run rate, targeted Not disclosed
FY2026-27 (company-stated target) Not disclosed Company targets reaching profitability

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

The risks

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).

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