Fish Audio Raises $52 Million in Seed Funding

Fish Audio, providers of an artificial intelligence voice platform for expressive real-time text-to-speech, voice cloning, and voice agents, has raised $52 million in seed funding.

Fish Audio will use the funding to expand its model lineup beyond text-to-speech into the full audio-native stack, including voice-native large language models, speech-to-speech, and more; build out its enterprise sales team; and deepen developer tooling and integrations with partners like LiveKit and Retell.

Fish Audio began when Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Shijia Liao, a former NVIDIA video researcher, lifelong VTuber, and anime fan, became frustrated with monotonous synthetic voices. Training models on a single gaming GPU, he set out to fix it. The resulting open-source project, Fish Speech, quickly became one of the most popular voice projects on GitHub.

Fish Audio can clone a voice from a 5-second clip in roughly 15 seconds, supporting more than 80 languages and providing word-level emotion control with more than 15,000 natural language controls.

"We built Fish Audio because we wanted voice AI that sounded human, not chunky or robotic, and we wanted that quality to be accessible at any scale," said Rissa Cao, co-founder and CEO of Fish Audio. "We make high-quality, human-sounding voices available to every user, from beginner creatives to million-dollar enterprises, so communication is not only more efficient, but more trustworthy. We've always believed that if we kept making the models better, people would notice. Eight million of them did. There's a lot of work left to do, and now we have the resources to do it."

"Voice is becoming the default interface for AI, and Fish Audio is unlocking this opportunity to a new generation of creators, developers, and enterprises," Osuke Honda, managing partner of Coreline Ventures, one of the leading investors, said in a statement. "In its short history, Fish Audio has built an unbeatable track record of pushing the envelope on performance, multilingual support, emotional expression, and cost. All factors that have quickly made Fish Audio the default choice for creators, developers, and now enterprises globally, and we expect them to continue to lead the way."