Pak Sun Ting used to spend his days in the structured world of global finance, advising institutional clients and leading fixed income deals across Asia. But in 2020, he stepped away from banking, leaving behind a stable, well-compensated role to start something wildly uncertain. It was a leap of logic as much as faith, and it gave birth to Votee AI, a startup determined to bring artificial intelligence to the thousands of languages that tech giants too often overlook.

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“I’m building to revolutionise enterprise AI adoption for Asia and Africa,” he says in his conversation with Unsensible. “The big large language models tackle English or Mandarin, but there’s over six thousand languages… we call it the AI haves and the AI have-nots.” It is not just a technical challenge he is trying to solve, but a cultural one. As AI becomes embedded in everything from education to enterprise software, Pak sees a growing risk that entire communities could be digitally sidelined. Votee aims to train large language models (LLMs) for what are known as low-resource languages, tongues with millions of speakers but scarce online data. Without that work, he warns, the next decade could create a deeper divide, where people with AI tools speed ahead, and those without fall into darkness. “If we don’t succeed, you’ll have people with access to productivity tools, and a space unlit. That’s 10 percent versus 90 percent of the world.

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Pak’s journey to this point started in investment banking. His CV reads like a tour of Asia’s financial institutions: J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, and Bank of China (Hong Kong), where he ran fixed income syndicate desks. For a time, it was the kind of career that made sense. But after nearly two decades in finance, something shifted. He began thinking more about systems than markets, more about tools than trades. “I thought my banking experience would well equip me,” he says, explaining how he saw capital, regulation and technology as the three engines that drive social change. When he finally left banking in 2020, he credits his wife for giving him the green light. “She gave me the licence,” he says. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have jumped.”

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Votee’s first major breakthrough came in Cantonese. Despite over 80 million speakers, most generalist models perform poorly in the language, often scoring below 60 percent in core tasks. That is not good enough for banks, governments or enterprise clients who need reliability. Voice assistants miss key phrases. Chatbots drop context. Customer support struggles. Votee built a model from scratch, trained on nuanced, fast-evolving Cantonese with all its local slang, tone and rhythm. It opened doors. From there, the company began expanding into other high-impact but under-served languages, evaluating them based on data availability, infrastructure readiness and enterprise potential.

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Pak and his team approached growth pragmatically. Instead of chasing Silicon Valley capital, they focused on revenue early. Votee secured contracts with banks, NGOs and corporates in Hong Kong and beyond. Strategic partnerships with players like Amazon helped scale their tech. Local angel investors and institutional backers in Europe added momentum. “The revenue helps you avoid dilution,” Pak notes, a banker’s instincts still very much intact.

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What sets Votee apart is not just technical ambition, but cultural sensibility. Pak is not trying to beat OpenAI at its own game. He is carving out a space for languages that are deeply embedded in identity, community and history. If AI is going to be the interface to the digital future, then everyone deserves a version that speaks their voice. “I think about the teacher in Hong Kong who could use this,” he says, imagining a world where AI tutors can coach Cantonese students, or small businesses in Africa can automate operations in their native tongue. “The next five years… awesome, enjoy the ride.”

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For founders just starting out, Pak offers measured advice. Validate early. Don’t go it alone. Find people with complementary skills and shared conviction. “If the other person has ace of hearts, you partner up. You can beat 90 on the table.”

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Pak Sun Ting’s second act is more than a pivot. It is a bet that AI can be a force for inclusion, not just efficiency. Through Votee AI, he is building the infrastructure for a world where no language, and no people, are left behind.

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