AI voice startup Fish Audio completes $50 million seed round financing

According to TechCrunch, Fish Audio announced on Tuesday that it has completed a $50 million seed round of financing. This round was led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from institutions such as 359 Capital, Parable, Play Time, Alphalist Partners, Bayhouse Ventures, Carya Venture Partners, and HF0.

Fish Audio was initially a small project initiated by former NVIDIA researcher Shijia Liao. Dissatisfied with the lack of expressive synthetic voice technology on the market, he trained a voice generation model using a single GPU and made it open source. Today, the Fish Speech project repository on GitHub has received over 31,000 stars and is widely used by independent developers, game designers, and content creators.

In the past year, Fish Audio has launched five models, including four voice generation models and one speech-to-text model. The company has open-sourced three of the voice generation models, but the latest S2.1 Pro model is currently only available through a paid API. Since its launch last year, the startup's open-source and hosted version models have attracted over 8 million users, with current annual recurring revenue (ARR) reaching $21 million.