Marty
Sarim

Marty Massih Sarim arrived in the United States from Kabul, Afghanistan in the early 1980s as a refugee. He landed in Minneapolis - not Silicon Valley, not New York - and built his career from the most unglamorous starting point imaginable: a phone at a collection agency, age 18.

That detail matters more than it sounds. Most executives who talk about "understanding the frontline" have never actually been on it. Sarim has. He knows what it's like to pick up a call where the connection is bad, where the customer is impatient, where your accent makes every word a small negotiation. He lived that. Then he spent the next 25 years building companies around it.

At Enhanced Resource Centers LLC, he worked his way from President and COO to President and CEO. He built and sold multiple BPO companies operating globally. He became an industry insider's industry insider - the kind of operator who other operators call when they have a problem they can't solve. By the time Stanford AI Lab spinout Sanas came looking for a president in 2022, there wasn't a more qualified person to run its global go-to-market.

Sanas does something that sounds almost too obvious once you hear it: it modulates call center agents' accents in real time, under 200 milliseconds, while preserving their voice, tone, and emotional cadence. The technology doesn't erase who someone is - it removes the signal that triggers customer bias. Sarim joined in May 2022, the company was at the beginning of serious commercial traction. By 2025, it had 750,000 users across the globe and had just closed a $65 million Series B led by Quadrille Capital.

The Series B brought in something more interesting than just capital - it included strategic investment from Teleperformance and Alorica, two of the largest BPO operators in the world. That's not coincidence. That's Sarim's Rolodex and credibility opening doors that pure technology companies can't knock on.

Sanas had also patented its real-time accent conversion AI technology in both the US and India by 2024, and expanded from its original accent modulation focus into a unified Speech AI platform - adding noise cancellation, speech enhancement, and real-time language translation. The product grew around the infrastructure that Sarim helped build commercially.

The core product is deceptively simple to describe: real-time accent modulation for contact center agents, under 200 milliseconds of latency, preserving voice, tone, and emotion. The technical challenge is enormous. Phoneme replacement at that latency, in noisy call center environments, across dozens of accent profiles - that's hard. But hard technology isn't the main obstacle Sanas faces.

The harder problem is cultural. Accent modification exists in a complicated space between accessibility and erasure. Sarim's framing is precise: accents themselves aren't the problem. The problem is accent bias - the well-documented tendency for listeners to rate speakers with non-native accents as less intelligent, less competent, less trustworthy. Sanas removes the trigger for that bias without asking agents to change who they are.

The company now operates as a unified Speech AI platform - not just accent modulation, but noise cancellation, speech enhancement, and real-time language translation. An agent in Bangalore or Manila can communicate with a customer in Dallas with the same clarity as a local hire, without any of the training costs, without the indignity of accent reduction classes, and without compromising their cultural identity.

The business model is enterprise B2B, targeting BPOs and contact centers at scale. Major customers span healthcare, logistics, and hardware manufacturing. The Teleperformance and Alorica investments in the Series B signal something important: these are the largest BPOs in the world placing a strategic bet that Sanas will become infrastructure for their operations.

In 2022 - the same year he joined Sanas - Sarim co-founded Carya Venture Partners with Sanas CEO Sharath Keshava Narayana and Andrés Pérez Soderi. Carya is a $20 million micro-fund focused on deep tech, AI, and B2B enterprise at the early stage. It's not a side project - Sarim is a General Partner.

The fund's positioning makes sense given who Sarim is. He's not a financial engineer. He's an operator with 25 years of pattern recognition in enterprise software and BPO - exactly the kind of GP that early-stage B2B SaaS companies need when they're trying to figure out how to sell to large corporations. He's been on the buying side. He knows how procurement actually works.

The Sanas connection makes Carya more interesting, not less. Sarim has direct access to portfolio companies at a large BPO operator - the exact customer profile that most enterprise AI startups are trying to reach. That's real deal flow intelligence, not just a rolodex.