{"slug": "fish-audio-makes-a-splash-after-raising-52m-seed-funding-for-ai-voices", "title": "Fish Audio makes a splash after raising $52M seed funding for AI voices", "summary": "Fish Audio, an artificial intelligence startup officially known as Hanabi AI Inc., has raised $52 million in seed funding led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today to establish voice as the default interface for AI models. The company's platform, which began as a weekend project with a single GPU, now supports 83 languages, clones voices from five-second clips in under 15 seconds, and has grown to over eight million users with $21 million in annual recurring revenue.", "body_md": "### Fish Audio makes a splash after raising $52M seed funding for AI voices\n\n[Fish Audio](https://fish.audio), an ambitious artificial intelligence startup that began life as a weekend project in its founder’s bedroom, said today it has raised an impressive $52 million in seed funding to try and establish voice as the default interface for every AI model.\n\nCoreline Ventures and Capital Today led the round, which also saw participation from a host of other backers, including 359 Capital, Play Time, HF0, 645 Ventures, Parable, Carya Venture Partners, Alphalist Partners and a number of unnamed angels.\n\nThe startup, which is officially known as Hanabi AI Inc., emerged from a familiar developer origin story. Its co-founder and Chief Scientist Shijia Liao, who formerly worked as a video researcher at Nvidia Corp. and is a lifelong fan of Japanese anime, explained that he grew tired of having to listen to the flat and monotonously robotic synthetic voices of early AI models, and decided that he needed to do something about it.\n\nLiao decided to start training his own voice AI models, and set out to do so with nothing more than a single graphics processing unit housed in the laptop in his bedroom. Despite the limited compute available to him, Liao managed to transform the initial [text-to-speech](https://fish.audio/tts/) and [voice cloning models](https://fish.audio/voice-clone/) he developed into [Fish Speech](https://speech.fish.audio/#tech-report), an open-source project that quickly gained rapid traction on GitHub. It amassed more than 31,000 stars as it caught the attention of indie developers, content creators and video games designers who were desperate for livelier and more expressive voice generation tools.\n\nSince its launch in 2023, Fish Audio has evolved to become one of the most [comprehensive voice AI platforms](https://fish.audio/studio/) in the business, used by developers to quickly build powerful text-to-speech and voice cloning systems as well as voice agents. The platform was designed specifically to eliminate the lifeless synthetic audio that characterized early AI models by providing granular, word-level emotion controls that are driven by over 15,000 natural language prompts. It allows developers to fine-tune the exact tone, inflection and pacing of their AI-generated voices.\n\nFish Audio’s platform is powerful. It claims to be able to clone a voice from a mere five-second audio clip in less than 15 seconds. It boasts native support for 83 languages too, and its current flagship model S2.1 Pro was able to outperform its top competitors in a series of [blind listening tests](https://fish.audio/blog/blind-tts-provider-comparison-2026/). According to those tests, 67% of listeners preferred Fish Audio’s voice outputs ahead of those from other models. Those numbers help to explain why its user base has grown to over eight million and its annual recurring revenue now exceeds $21 million.\n\nCreate realistic voices on Fish Audio today!\n\n[#fishaudio][#TTS][#aivoice][pic.twitter.com/LOwqFtBH5d]— Fish Audio (@FishAudio)\n\n[July 20, 2026]\n\nWhile initially targeted at video games developers and content creators, Fish Audio now caters to organizations in regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, offering secure on-premises deployments with zero-data retention and HIPAA compliance to avoid compromising customer privacy. Today’s round positions Fish Audio as a formidable challenger to better known voice AI startups such as ElevenLabs Inc., which [recently raised $500 million](https://siliconangle.com/2026/02/04/voice-ai-startup-elevenlabs-triples-valuation-500m-round/) in a round that valued it at a staggering $11 billion.\n\nFish Audio Chief Executive Rissa Cao said he started the company along with Liao because he wanted to make AI voices that sound human to be accessible to everyone. “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,” he insisted. “We’ve always believed that if we kept making the models better, people would notice. Eight million of them did.”\n\nFollowing today’s massive cash infusion, the startup is now looking to expand its model lineup beyond its initial text-to-speech capabilities. It intends to build a full audio-native stack that’s composed of voice-native large language models and real-time speech-to-speech translation tools. At the same time, it also plans to invest in an enterprise sales team and expand its developer tooling with more application programming interface integrations through partners such as Retell AI Inc. and LiveKit Inc..\n\nFish Audio also wants to accelerate the adoption of its platform, and to that end it’s planning to make its flagship S2.1 Pro model available to every developer free of charge through its official API, starting at the end of August.\n\nCoreline Ventures’ managing partner Osuke Honda said he invested in Fish Audio because he believes voice is rapidly becoming the default interface for AI systems. “In its short history, Fish Audio has built an unbeatable track record of pushing the envelope on performance, multilingual support, emotional expression and cost,” he said. “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.”\n\n##### Image: Fish Audio\n\n# A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:\n\nSupport our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. **Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network**, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.\n\n**15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos**, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more** 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni**— Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.\n\n# Are you AWS customer? 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Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fish-audio-makes-a-splash-after-raising-52m-seed-funding-for-ai-voices", "canonical_source": "https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-makes-splash-raising-52m-seed-funding-ai-voices/", "published_at": "2026-07-28 13:30:55+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-28 13:53:25.654085+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-products", "generative-ai", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Fish Audio", "Hanabi AI Inc.", "Coreline Ventures", "Capital Today", "Shijia Liao", "Rissa Cao", "ElevenLabs Inc.", "Nvidia Corp."], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fish-audio-makes-a-splash-after-raising-52m-seed-funding-for-ai-voices", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fish-audio-makes-a-splash-after-raising-52m-seed-funding-for-ai-voices.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fish-audio-makes-a-splash-after-raising-52m-seed-funding-for-ai-voices.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fish-audio-makes-a-splash-after-raising-52m-seed-funding-for-ai-voices.jsonld"}}