AI voice startup Fish Audio closes $50 million seed round.

According to TechCrunch, Fish Audio announced Tuesday that it has closed a $50 million seed funding round. The round was led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from investors including 359 Capital, Parable, Play Time, Alphalist Partners, Bayhouse Ventures, Carya Venture Partners, and HF0. Fish Audio originated as a small project launched by Shijia Liao, a former NVIDIA researcher. Dissatisfied with the lack of high-performing synthetic speech technology in the market, Liao trained a speech generation model using a single GPU and open-sourced it. Today, the Fish Speech project repository has earned over 31,000 stars on GitHub, and is widely used by independent developers, game designers, and content creators. Over the past year, Fish Audio has rolled out 5 models: 4 speech generation models and 1 speech-to-text model. The company has open-sourced 3 of the speech generation models, while its latest S2.1 Pro model is currently only accessible via a paid API. Since its launch last year, the startup’s open-source and hosted model versions have attracted over 8 million users, with annual recurring revenue (ARR) hitting $21 million.