The voice AI platform grew from a side project to $21M ARR and 8 million users in its first year

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Fish Audio, the AI voice platform for expressive real-time text-to-speech, voice cloning, and voice agents, today 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 round comes as the company marks its first anniversary, having grown from zero to $21 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 8 million users across creators, developers, and enterprises.

Fish Audio began in the bedroom of Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Shijia Liao, a former NVIDIA video researcher and lifelong VTuber and anime fan 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 with more than 31,000 stars and a devoted following among indie developers, video game designers, and creators. Now, Fish Audio is one of the fastest-growing companies in voice AI, capable of cloning a voice from a 5-second clip in roughly 15 seconds, supporting 83+ languages, and providing word-level emotion control with more than 15,000 natural language controls. From the start, the mission has been to make expressive, high-quality voice AI accessible to everyone, and the company’s growth shows that mission is resonating.

“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.”

Fish Audio voice AI models meet the demands of the most ambitious developers and enterprises. Its models are fast, easy to integrate, and competitive with the best in the category. Its most recent model, S2.1 Pro, is preferred by nearly 67% of listeners over leading competitors in blind listening tests. For enterprises operating in regulated industries, Fish Audio provides on-premises deployment, zero-data-retention policies, and HIPAA-compliant configurations, giving security and procurement teams the assurances they need without slowing innovation.

“Voice is becoming the default interface for AI, and Fish Audio is unlocking this opportunity to a new generation of creators, developers, and enterprises,” said Osuke Honda, Managing Partner at Coreline Ventures. “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.”

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

Through the end of August, the company’s largest and most robust model, S2.1 Pro, will be free for developers via API. Begin building today at fish.audio.

About Fish Audio
Fish Audio is the AI voice platform built for speed and control, for developers and enterprises alike. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Palo Alto, Fish Audio grew out of Fish Speech, one of the most-starred open-source voice projects on GitHub, into a platform serving more than 8 million creators, developers, and enterprises, including HeyGen, Retell, LiveKit, OpenArt, Telnyx and Sanas. Its open models deliver expressive, real-time text-to-speech, voice cloning, and voice agents in more than 83 languages, and can be self-hosted for teams that want full control over their data and infrastructure. To learn more, visit fish.audio.

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SOURCE Fish Audio