{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-10-14T00:22:00+02:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-07-28-fish-audio-52m-seed/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-07-28-fish-audio-52m-seed/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2026-07-28-fish-audio-52m-seed","date":"2026-07-28","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Fish Audio raises a $52M seed round led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today","deck":null,"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.","category":"business","category_label":"Business","importance":2,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Press release (VCAOnline copy): Fish Audio Raises $52M in Seed Funding","url":"https://www.vcaonline.com/news/2026072807/fish-audio-raises-52m-in-seed-funding-after-turning-passion-project-into-one-of-voice-ai-s-fastest-growing-companies/","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"vcaonline.com"},{"n":2,"title":"TechCrunch: Fish Audio raises $52M seed to build AI voice models for creators and enterprises","url":"https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-raises-50m-seed-to-build-ai-voice-models-for-creators-and-enterprises/","type":"press","group":"press","domain":"techcrunch.com"},{"n":3,"title":"Pulse 2.0: Fish Audio Raises $52 Million Seed Round","url":"https://pulse2.com/fish-audio-raises-52-million-seed-round-to-expand-expressive-voice-ai-platform/","type":"press","group":"press","domain":"pulse2.com"}],"official":1,"filed":"2026-10-13","updated":"2026-10-13","orgs":["Fish Audio","Coreline Ventures","Capital Today"],"title":"Fish Audio raises a $52M seed round led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today","summary":"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. The valuation was not disclosed. The money is meant for voice-native LLMs, speech-to-speech models and enterprise sales; on 2026-10-13 the company released the open-weight model Drama 3.","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"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["funding","tts","speech","voice","voice-cloning","seed-round"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nFish 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.\n\nCoreline'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.\"\n\nTechCrunch 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.\n\nOne aggregator (SaaSRise) gives a closing date of 2026-08-05; the announcement date in the press release and TechCrunch is 2026-07-28.\n\n## Why it matters\n\n$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.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2026-10-13-fish-audio-drama-3","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-13-fish-audio-drama-3/","date":"2026-10-13","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Fish Audio releases Drama 3","deck":"A 35B open-weight TTS model directed in plain language, with word-level edits","takeaway":"Weights are on Hugging Face under a new Fish Audio Community License: free for research and non-commercial use, commercial use only below USD 500,000 annual revenue, no hosted services.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":15,"official":13,"filed":"2026-10-13","updated":"2026-10-13","orgs":["Fish Audio"]},{"id":"2026-03-09-fish-audio-s2-open-source","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-03-09-fish-audio-s2-open-source/","date":"2026-03-09","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Fish Audio open-sources S2","deck":"Expressive 80+ language TTS with inline emotion tags","takeaway":"It made open TTS with fine-grained, LLM-style prompt control and production streaming available to the public, and set the open-weights bar for most of 2026.","category":"open-source","category_label":"Open source","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":4,"official":4,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-10-13","orgs":["Fish Audio"]}],"people":[],"posts":[{"id":"x-fishaudio-2110038429199450126","title":"Fish Audio introduces Drama 3: 'the most emotive and controllable TTS model in the world', open-weight","url":"https://postcutoff.com/p/x-fishaudio-2110038429199450126/"}],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-10-13","type":"filed","text":"Created (found while researching the Drama 3 release; the round had not been covered)"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-10-13","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-10-13","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-13"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":89,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":28,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"gemini-4-argon","name":"Gemini 4 Argon","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":119,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":58,"in_training_data":false}],"short_url":null}