Fish Audio raises a $52M seed round led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today
Confirmed
The takeaway
On 2026-07-28 voice-AI startup Fish Audio announced a $52M seed round led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, reporting about $21M in annual recurring revenue and more than 8 million users.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 13 October 2026
Your AI and this story
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None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 28 days before it.
Key facts
- $52M seed, announced 2026-07-28 (PR Newswire, dateline Palo Alto; TechCrunch the same day)
- Leads: Coreline Ventures and Capital Today. Others named: 359 Capital, Play Time, HF0, 645 Ventures, Parable, Carya Venture Partners, Alphalist Partners and angels (press release); TechCrunch also lists Bayhouse Ventures
- Valuation: not disclosed
- Company-reported: about $21M ARR and more than 8 million users of the open-source or hosted models; Fish Speech had more than 31,000 GitHub stars (TechCrunch)
- Founders: Rissa Cao (CEO) and Shijia Liao (chief scientist, former Nvidia researcher, started the open-source Fish Speech project)
- Planned use: voice-native LLMs, speech-to-speech, an audio understanding model, enterprise sales, developer integrations (LiveKit, Retell)
- TechCrunch reported creators’ complaints that their voices were uploaded without consent and that DMCA takedowns were slow; Cao said takedowns are now automated and take under three minutes after a voice sample or contract is submitted
What happened
Fish Audio, the company behind the open-source Fish Speech project and the S2 speech models, announced a $52M seed round on 2026-07-28. Coreline Ventures and Capital Today led it. The company reported about $21M in annual recurring revenue and more than 8 million users, and said it had launched five models in a year (four for speech generation, one for speech-to-text). Its newest model at the time, S2.1 Pro, was available only through the API.
Coreline’s managing partner Osuke Honda said: “Voice is becoming the default interface for AI.” On consent, he told TechCrunch: “A community-centric approach can only become a durable advantage if creators trust the platform.”
TechCrunch noted that automated takedowns do not stop someone from uploading an artist’s voice without their knowledge; the voice stays up until the artist finds it and files for removal.
One aggregator (SaaSRise) gives a closing date of 2026-08-05; the announcement date in the press release and TechCrunch is 2026-07-28.
Why it matters
$52M is large for a seed round and shows investor interest in voice models outside the biggest labs. The round funded Drama 3, which Fish Audio opened its October launch post with: “$52M seed round. 15M+ users.” The user count is the company’s own figure and nearly doubled in eleven weeks.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 1 primary, 2 press
Primary
- Press release (VCAOnline copy): Fish Audio Raises $52M in Seed Fundingvcaonline.com, official
Press
- TechCrunch: Fish Audio raises $52M seed to build AI voice models for creators and enterprisestechcrunch.com, press
- Pulse 2.0: Fish Audio Raises $52 Million Seed Roundpulse2.com, press
Changes
- Filed (found while researching the Drama 3 release; the round had not been covered)