---
id: "2026-07-28-fish-audio-52m-seed"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-07-28-fish-audio-52m-seed/"
as_of: "2026-10-14T00:22:00+02:00"
date: "2026-07-28"
date_precision: day
category: business
importance: 2
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 3
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-13"
---

As of: 2026-10-14 00:22 CEST.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-07-28-fish-audio-52m-seed/

# Fish Audio raises a $52M seed round led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today

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

## 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): 89 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): 28 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon (training cutoff March 2026): 119 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): 58 days after its cutoff

## Sources

1. [Press release (VCAOnline copy): Fish Audio Raises $52M in Seed Funding](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/) (vcaonline.com, official)
2. [TechCrunch: Fish Audio raises $52M seed to build AI voice models for creators and enterprises](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-raises-50m-seed-to-build-ai-voice-models-for-creators-and-enterprises/) (techcrunch.com, press)
3. [Pulse 2.0: Fish Audio Raises $52 Million Seed Round](https://pulse2.com/fish-audio-raises-52-million-seed-round-to-expand-expressive-voice-ai-platform/) (pulse2.com, press)

## Changes

- 2026-10-13 (filed): Created (found while researching the Drama 3 release; the round had not been covered)

## Related

- 2026-10-13: [Fish Audio releases Drama 3](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-13-fish-audio-drama-3/index.md)
- 2026-03-09: [Fish Audio open-sources S2](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-03-09-fish-audio-s2-open-source/index.md)
- Archived: 1 post, listed in https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-07-28-fish-audio-52m-seed/index.json