Just days after Pivot.uz reported that Speko, the AI startup founded by Uzbek entrepreneur Beknazar (Bek) Abdikamalov, had been accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 batch, the company has officially unveiled its first product.
Speko describes itself as an “OpenRouter for Voice”—a platform that automatically selects the best combination of speech-to-text (STT), large language models (LLMs), and text-to-speech (TTS) systems based on the user’s language and use case.
According to founder Beknazar Abdikamalov, building a reliable voice AI agent is no longer about choosing a single model. The real challenge is keeping up with the rapidly evolving AI landscape, where new models are released almost every week and yesterday’s top-performing stack can quickly become outdated. To solve this problem, Speko continuously benchmarks voice AI models across multiple performance metrics, including:
- Word Error Rate (WER)
- Final latency
- Time to First Token (TTFT)
- Cost per minute
Based on these benchmark results, the platform automatically routes traffic to the best-performing model stack. As new benchmark results become available, routing updates automatically—allowing developers to benefit from the latest improvements without rewriting their code.
The company also makes its benchmark data publicly available, giving developers transparent insights into how different speech models perform across languages and real-world use cases.
Backed by Y Combinator, Speko aims to simplify the infrastructure behind AI voice agents by eliminating the need for developers to constantly evaluate and switch between rapidly changing speech models.
The voice AI ecosystem is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Companies building AI assistants, customer support agents, and voice applications increasingly rely on multiple AI models working together rather than a single provider. Speko’s routing platform automates one of the most time-consuming parts of that process, helping teams improve performance, reduce costs, and always use the most effective AI stack available.
As one of the latest startups with Uzbek roots to join Y Combinator, Speko is also a strong example of how founders from Central Asia are building products that address global AI infrastructure challenges.
