Fish Audio, a Palo Alto voice-AI startup, has raised $52m in a round it still calls a seed, first reported by TechCrunch. It arrives at a company with an unusual shape. It gives its best models away, and charges for the wiring around them.
The startup is a year old. It says more than 8 million people now use its models, through either the open-weight releases or its hosted platform. The business runs at $21m in annual recurring revenue.
Give the model away, charge for the latency
Fish Audio’s logic is the open-source playbook applied to voice. It has shipped five models in a year and open-sourced three of them. Free weights and a free frontier model buy distribution among developers. Revenue comes from the enterprises that need contracts.
Even its newest model, S2.1 Pro, which it holds back from open release, is free over the API until 31 August. It clones a voice from a five-second clip, supports 83 languages, and returns first audio in about 70 milliseconds. The paid plans are where the latency and uptime guarantees live. Fish asks anyone above $1m in revenue to talk before building on the free tier, Unite.AI reported.
