Fish Audio makes a splash after raising $52M seed funding for AI voices

SiliconANGLE UPDATED 09:30 EDT / JULY 28 2026 AI Fish Audio makes a splash after raising $52M seed funding for AI voices by Mike Wheatley Fish Audio , an ambitious artificial intelligence startup that began life as a weekend project in its founder's bedroom, said today it has raised an impressive $52 million in seed funding to try and establish voice as the default interface for every AI model. Coreline Ventures and Capital Today led the round, which also saw participation from a host of other backers, including 359 Capital, Play Time, HF0, 645 Ventures, Parable, Carya Venture Partners, Alphalist Partners and a number of unnamed angels. The startup, which is officially known as Hanabi AI Inc.

, emerged from a familiar developer origin story. Its co-founder and Chief Scientist Shijia Liao, who formerly worked as a video researcher at Nvidia Corp. and is a lifelong fan of Japanese anime, explained that he grew tired of having to listen to the flat and monotonously robotic synthetic voices of early AI models, and decided that he needed to do something about it.

Liao decided to start training his own voice AI models, and set out to do so with nothing more than a single graphics processing unit housed in the laptop in his bedroom. Despite the limited compute available to him, Liao managed to transform the initial text-to-speech and voice cloning models he developed into Fish Speech , an open-source project that quickly gained rapid traction on GitHub. It amassed more than 31,000 stars as it caught the attention of indie developers, content creators and video games designers who were desperate for livelier and more expressive voice generation tools.