Fish Audio Raises $52M Seed Round With $21M ARR Across 8 Million Users

Fish Audio, operating as Hanabi AI Inc., has raised $52 million in seed funding led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, the AI voice startup announced on its first anniversary with $21 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 8 million users. The company's flagship S2.1 Pro model was preferred by 67% of listeners over competitors in blind tests and supports 83 languages, with enterprise customers including OpenAI, HeyGen, and LiveKit. The funds will be used to develop voice-native large language models, speech-to-speech translation, and expand the enterprise sales team.

Fish Audio Raises $52M Seed Round With $21M ARR Across 8 Million Users - Fish Audio raised $52M in seed funding led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from 645 Ventures, HF0, and others 1 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fish-audio-raises-52m-in-seed-funding-after-turning-passion-project-into-one-of-voice-ais-fastest-growing-companies-302836233.html - The company hit $21M ARR and 8M+ users within its first year, with enterprise customers including OpenAI, HeyGen, and LiveKit 2 https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-raises-50m-seed-to-build-ai-voice-models-for-creators-and-enterprises/ - Its flagship S2.1 Pro model was preferred by 67% of listeners over competitors in blind tests and supports 83 languages 2 https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-raises-50m-seed-to-build-ai-voice-models-for-creators-and-enterprises/ - Funds will go toward voice-native LLMs, speech-to-speech translation, and an enterprise sales team 3 https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-makes-splash-raising-52m-seed-funding-ai-voices/ - Fish Audio competes with ElevenLabs, which raised $500M at an $11B valuation earlier this year 3 https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-makes-splash-raising-52m-seed-funding-ai-voices/ Fish Audio, operating under the legal name Hanabi AI Inc., has raised $52 million in seed funding as the AI voice startup marks its first anniversary with $21 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 8 million users. Coreline Ventures and Capital Today co-led the round, with participation from 359 Capital, Play Time, HF0, 645 Ventures, Parable, Carya Venture Partners, and Alphalist Partners 1 . The Palo Alto-based company builds AI voice models for real-time text-to-speech, voice cloning, and voice agents. Its platform can clone a voice from a five-second audio clip in roughly 15 seconds and supports 83 languages with word-level emotion controls driven by more than 15,000 natural language prompts 2 . Fish Audio's customer roster already includes several prominent AI companies: OpenAI, HeyGen, Retell, LiveKit, Telnyx, and Sanas all use its technology. The startup plans to use the new capital to move beyond text-to-speech into voice-native large language models and real-time speech-to-speech translation, while also building out its enterprise sales team 1 . The Round The $52 million seed is unusually large for a pre-Series A company and reflects the rapid commercialization Fish Audio achieved in its first year. The round was co-led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with a syndicate that includes 645 Ventures, HF0, Parable, Carya Venture Partners, and Alphalist Partners, plus unnamed angel investors 1 . No valuation was disclosed. The company said it will deploy the capital across three priorities: expanding its model lineup with voice-native LLMs and speech-to-speech tools, deepening developer integrations with partners like LiveKit and Retell AI, and hiring an enterprise sales team 2 . The Founders and Origin Story Fish Audio was co-founded by Chief Scientist Shijia Liao and CEO Rissa Cao. Liao, a former Nvidia video researcher and longtime VTuber and anime enthusiast, started training voice models on a single gaming GPU out of frustration with the monotonous quality of synthetic voices at the time 1 . His open-source Fish Speech project on GitHub accumulated more than 31,000 stars, attracting indie developers, video game designers, and content creators before the pair formalized the effort into a venture-backed company 2 . The Product Fish Audio's flagship model, S2.1 Pro, was preferred by 67% of listeners over competitors in blind listening tests, according to the company. The platform supports voice cloning from five-second audio samples, real-time text-to-speech across 83 languages, and fine-grained emotion control at the word level 2 . For enterprise customers, the company offers on-premises deployment and HIPAA-compliant configurations. Fish Audio said it will make S2.1 Pro available for free starting at the end of August 3 . Competitive Landscape Fish Audio enters a crowded AI voice market headlined by ElevenLabs, which raised $500 million at an $11 billion valuation earlier this year. Other competitors include Amazon's Polly, Google's Cloud Text-to-Speech, and a growing cohort of startups targeting real-time voice synthesis 3 . Fish Audio's open-source roots and developer community give it a different distribution channel than most competitors. The 31,000-star GitHub repository serves as a funnel for both individual creators and enterprise prospects who first experiment with the open-source models before adopting the hosted commercial platform 2 . What's Next The company's roadmap extends well beyond text-to-speech. Fish Audio plans to build voice-native large language models — AI systems designed from the ground up to process and generate speech, rather than treating voice as an add-on to text-based models 1 . It is also developing real-time speech-to-speech translation tools and expanding API integrations through partnerships with voice infrastructure companies like LiveKit and Retell AI. The enterprise sales team buildout signals a shift toward larger contract sizes as the company moves upmarket from its creator and developer base 2 . Further sources The stories that matter, in one email. Free — unsubscribe anytime.