Voice AI startup Fish Audio raises $52 million seed round

6:02 AM · July 28, 2026

Fish Audio, a Palo Alto based AI voice startup, announced on July 28, 2026 that it raised a $52 million seed round led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from 359 Capital, Parable, Play Time, Alphalist Partners, Bayhouse Ventures, Carya Venture Partners and HF0. The company, founded by former Nvidia researcher Shijia Liao alongside CEO Rissa Cao, has built a library of more than 15,000 natural language voice controls and says its open source Fish Speech repository has drawn more than 31,000 GitHub stars, with over 8 million people using its open source or hosted voice models and $21 million in annual recurring revenue across five models launched in the past year. Clients using Fish Audio's voice models include HeyGen, Sanas and LiveKit, spanning use cases from AI generated video avatars to real time accent conversion for customer support calls. “Every enterprise has different use cases and different preferences, companies like HeyGen want realism in voices, gaming studios want expressive voices for characters,” said CEO Rissa Cao, describing the company's approach of offering a wide range of customizable voice styles rather than a single default voice. The new funding will go toward developing an audio understanding model and a speech to speech model, extending the company beyond its current text to speech and voice cloning products as competition in AI voice technology intensifies among both startups and larger labs building multimodal models with native audio capabilities.