Fish Audio's S2.1 Pro Beats ElevenLabs at 11x Lower Cost After $52M Raise
Fish Audio raises $52M seed, launches S2.1 Pro with 5-second voice cloning, 83-language support, and pricing that undercuts ElevenLabs by up to 6x
- $52M seed raised led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today; Fish Audio hit $21M ARR and 8M users in its first year.
- S2.1 Pro launched with 5-second voice cloning, 83-language support, and word-level emotion/intonation control via 15,000+ natural language tags.
- Pricing undercuts rivals: $15/1M characters vs. ElevenLabs' $60-$165/1M; company claims 2x faster than Cartesia at 1/6th the cost of ElevenLabs.
- 67% blind-test preference over leading competitors; 56.3 chars/sec throughput, faster than GPT-Realtime-2 and Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS.
- Enterprise customers include HeyGen, LiveKit, Retell, and Sanas; HIPAA-compliant on-prem deployments now available.
- S2.1 Pro free via API through August 31; roadmap includes speech-to-speech models and voice-native LLMs.
Fish Audio just pulled off one of the more remarkable origin stories in AI: a bedroom side project by a former NVIDIA researcher turned into a $21M ARR voice platform with 8 million users in exactly one year. Today, the company announced a $52 million seed round and the public launch of its flagship model, S2.1 Pro, a text-to-speech system built around expressiveness, speed, and aggressive pricing.
From a single GPU to $52M
Fish Audio began in the bedroom of co-founder and Chief Scientist Shijia Liao, a former NVIDIA video researcher and lifelong VTuber and anime fan frustrated with monotonous synthetic voices, who started training models on a single gaming GPU. The resulting open-source project, Fish Speech, quickly became one of the most popular voice projects on GitHub with more than 31,000 stars. That open-source gravity pulled in creators, game developers, and indie builders, and eventually became the foundation for a real business.
The $52 million seed round was led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from 359 Capital, Play Time, HF0, 645 Ventures, Parable, Carya Venture Partners, and Alphalist Partners. The round comes as the company marks its first anniversary, having grown from zero to $21 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 8 million users across creators, developers, and enterprises.
What S2.1 Pro actually does
S2.1 Pro is not just a quality upgrade. It is a rethink of what control over a voice model should look like. Most TTS APIs let you pick a voice and adjust speed. Fish Audio goes much further.
- 5-second voice cloning: The platform claims it can clone a voice from a mere five-second audio clip in less than 15 seconds.
- Word-level emotion control: The model supports over 15,000 natural language controls, letting you steer intonation, pacing, and emotional tone at the word level, not just the sentence level.