Technology and Science28 July, 20263 min read
Fish Audio Raises $52 Million Seed Funding Led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today
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Seed funding totals $52 million, led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today. Platform reports 8 million users in year one and $21 million ARR.
Seed round for voice AI
Fish Audio, a Palo Alto-based voice AI platform, announced $52 million in seed funding led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from 359 Capital, Play Time, HF0, 645 Ventures, Parable, Carya Venture Partners, Alphalist Partners, and leading angel investors. The company said the round came as it marked its first anniversary and grew from zero to $21 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 8 million users across creators, developers, and enterprises. Fish Audio traces its origin to co-founder and Chief Scientist Shijia Liao, a former NVIDIA video researcher who trained models on a single GPU before open-sourcing the project Fish Speech, which has more than 31,000 stars on GitHub.
The platform’s model lineup includes five models in roughly a year—four for speech generation and one for speech-to-text—and it said three of the speech models are open source while the newest one, S2.1 Pro, is only available through a paid API. In its product description, Fish Audio said it can clone a voice from a 5-second clip in roughly 15 seconds and provide word-level emotion control with more than 15,000 natural language controls.
Consent and takedowns
TechCrunch reported that Fish Audio’s approach to building its voice library involved asking users to submit their own voices for training and compensating them if their voices are used, but it said the process led to trouble when some creators alleged their voices were uploaded without their consent. In response, TechCrunch said Fish Audio had a DMCA takedown process in place but that the takedowns took a long time, and it added that CEO Rissa Cao told the outlet the company has now automated the takedown process. Cao said creators can submit a short voice sample or a contract to prove that an uploaded voice belongs to them, and TechCrunch reported that Fish Audio’s system will take a voice off the startup’s platform in less than three minutes.
Coreline Ventures managing partner Osuke Honda framed the investment thesis around trust, telling TechCrunch, "A community-centric approach can only become a durable advantage if creators trust the platform." Honda added that consent, transparency, and attribution must be built into the product rather than treated as afterthoughts, and he said the industry needs verified voice ownership, clear licensing terms, easy reporting and takedown processes, and revenue-sharing models.
What the funding changes
Fish Audio said it will use the seed funding to expand its model lineup beyond text-to-speech into the full audio-native stack, including voice-native LLMs and speech-to-speech. The company also said it plans to build out its enterprise sales team and deepen developer tooling and integrations with partners like LiveKit and Retell. In parallel, Fish Audio said that through the end of August, its largest and most robust model, S2.1 Pro, will be free for developers via API.
“Through the end of August, the company's largest and most robust model, S2.1 Pro, will be free for developers via API.”
Unite.AI described the same $52 million round as co-led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today and said Fish Audio says more than 8 million people now use its models through open-weight releases or its hosted platform. Unite.AI also reported that CEO and co-founder Rissa Cao said the company had been running efficiently enough on open-source distribution and creator subscriptions that it did not need outside capital, and that the funding is meant to fund more advanced models and a push into enterprise accounts.