I am not sure if it would work on your compressor or not, but there are some fairly sophisticated motor controllers that ramp up the rpm slowly vs going right to full blast.
Sometimes they are called variable speed drives / variable frequency drives but there might be another name.
You do need to be careful to not run the motor at too low of rpm for a long time as they depend on the fan rpm to cool.
The price of these has been coming down a lot over the past 20 years.