Aoi Otani

Aoi Otani
Occupation	Entrepreneur, startup founder
Known for	Co-founder and CTO of Liva AI

Aoi Otani is an entrepreneur and co-founder and CTO of Liva AI, a company that collects and licenses targeted audio and video training data for artificial intelligence model labs. The company is based in San Francisco and is backed by Y Combinator as part of its Summer 2025 batch. Otani co-founded the company alongside Ashley Mo, who serves as a fellow active founder.

Education

Otani studied Computer Science and Biology at Harvard University, a background that informs her focus on the intersection of technical infrastructure and human-centered data collection.

Career

Otani co-founded Liva AI to address limitations in speech and video AI models that are trained primarily on internet-sourced data, which often lack realistic and domain-specific qualities. In her role as CTO, she oversees the technical direction of the company's data collection and licensing platform. The company's stated mission is to "make voice AI feel human" by building what it describes as the world's richest dataset of human expressions.

Liva AI collects naturally occurring, rights-cleared human audio and video data and delivers it to research teams building next-generation voice and video models. The company operates both an off-the-shelf catalog and a custom data collection service. Its catalog includes over 60 datasets spanning more than 20 languages, covering a range of use cases such as Japanese medical conversation, group Swahili conversation, casual Hindi dialogue, Japanese business conversation, English emotional casual conversation, multilingual audio, group Tagalog conversation, audio-visual casual speaking, Radio Algerian Arabic, and Japanese emotional speech data.

For off-the-shelf data licensing, clients can request access to the catalog, receive samples, and sign a data licensing agreement, with datasets available within a few days. For custom data needs, the company works with clients to understand specific research requirements before collecting and delivering data on a pre-agreed timeline. Liva AI is categorized within the marketplace, B2B, data labeling, big data, and AI industries.

The company has attracted attention for its focus on domain-specific and multilingual audio data at a time when major AI laboratories are seeking higher-quality training corpora to improve the naturalness of voice and video models. Liva AI has been reported to offer competitive compensation packages as it scales its operations team, reflecting broader demand in the AI data sector.