Cartesia

On Friday we published our State of Voice AI for 2024. Here are some of the companies we're excited about in each part of the voice stack: Vertical Agents: Salient, Hippocratic AI, Hyro, Hello Patient, Assort Health, HappyRobot, Slang.ai, EliseAI, and HostAI (YC W24) are disrupting verticals like finance, healthcare, auto, logistics, restaurants, and hospitality. Core Business Functions: Mercor, micro1, 11x, Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Forethought, Yellow.ai, and Parloa are transforming traditional business functions like recruiting, sales, and customer support. Voice Agent Platforms: Daily, LiveKit, Vapi, Bland AI, Retell AI, and Thoughtly have built developer platforms to build voice agents, while others like Goodcall, Cresta, Replicant, and Kore.ai have built conversational AI platforms for any business to deploy production-grade agents. Content Creation: HeyGen, Tavus, Hedra, Synthesia, Artlist, D-ID, and Captions enable content creators to create more content and let their imaginations run free with AI video creation and editing. Gaming: Inworld AI and Volley are pioneering Voice AI to create more immersive experiences in gaming, from responsive NPCs to voice changers. Consumer Services: Delphi, Sonia (YC W24), and Replika are bringing voice AI directly to consumers, offering everything from coaching to companionship.

On Friday we published our State of Voice AI for 2024. Here are some of the companies we're excited about in each part of the voice stack: Vertical Agents: Salient, Hippocratic AI, Hyro, Hello Patient, Assort Health, HappyRobot, Slang.ai, EliseAI, and HostAI (YC W24) are disrupting verticals like finance, healthcare, auto, logistics, restaurants, and hospitality. Core Business Functions: Mercor, micro1, 11x, Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Forethought, Yellow.ai, and Parloa are transforming traditional business functions like recruiting, sales, and customer support. Voice Agent Platforms: Daily, LiveKit, Vapi, Bland AI, Retell AI, and Thoughtly have built developer platforms to build voice agents, while others like Goodcall, Cresta, Replicant, and Kore.ai have built conversational AI platforms for any business to deploy production-grade agents. Content Creation: HeyGen, Tavus, Hedra, Synthesia, Artlist, D-ID, and Captions enable content creators to create more content and let their imaginations run free with AI video creation and editing. Gaming: Inworld AI and Volley are pioneering Voice AI to create more immersive experiences in gaming, from responsive NPCs to voice changers. Consumer Services: Delphi, Sonia (YC W24), and Replika are bringing voice AI directly to consumers, offering everything from coaching to companionship.

🎉 Excited to share our 2024 State of Voice! After working with hundreds of founders, product leaders, and engineers this year, we noticed some fascinating patterns emerging in the space. Key highlights from 2024: ↳ Revolutionary new architectures for voice interaction ↳ Enterprise-grade APIs enabling natural conversations ↳ Simplified platforms for building & deploying voice agents ↳ Voice AI adoption across every vertical ↳ Voice AI adoption across core business processes ↳ Enhanced entertainment experiences with interactive characters Our 2025 predictions: ↳ Speech-to-speech models become mainstream ↳ Voice agents handle increasingly complex workflows ↳ On-device models enable local conversations anywhere ↳ Greater control over voice characteristics Read the full post here:  https://lnkd.in/gDBcSr54 

Excited to collaborate with Project Odyssey and eagerly looking forward to witnessing the participants' incredible stories unfold!

We're excited to officially welcome Darius Kianersi, who interned with us this fall, to our Technical Staff 🎉 . Darius was studying Computer Science and Math at the University of Maryland before taking leave to join the team. Previously, he's interned at NVIDIA and Microsoft, working on model reasoning for deep learning compilers, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and kernel performance. "The rocket-ship trajectory of this team was clear to me within a few days of joining. Excited to build out the future of multimodal intelligence with the brightest group of people!" he said of joining the team.

AI will be everywhere, but needs to be way faster, process longer contexts and remember more before it's universal. Transformers won't get us there. Cartesia is building towards that future with pioneering architectures for AI Excited to announce our $27M seed :) Congrats Karan, Albert, Brandon, Arjun and team! It’s been amazing to see such an absolutely cracked team execute over the past months, thanks for letting me have a little sidecar seat :) Check out the blog and playground in the first comment.

It's been a amazing to see our work on SSMs go from academia to powering real-time voice in production across thousands of customers. And excited to share a sneak peak into our research on multi-stream models for multimodal data. Grateful for our early team and supporters :)

Congrats Karan Goel and the entire Cartesia team. They are pioneering an alternative approach to LLMs, starting with audio. Hugely privileged to be an early investor.

Excited to share our seed round on the journey to revolutionize interactive, multimodal intelligence. 🚀 ---- During my PhD, it was clear to me that I wanted to work on problems in ML that have a real-world impact on people. When we started Cartesia, we set out to reimagine the fundamental building blocks of machine learning to do just this — how do we build long-living intelligence that reasons and interacts with people and the world around us. This requires a paradigm shift in how we think about modeling — not just quality but also efficiency. Our work on state space models (SSMs) have enabled breakthroughs in building more efficient, scalable, and reasoning-capable AI systems that can tackle complex challenges across a wide array of applications. Some highlights from the past year - Built state-of-the-art, ultrafast audio models - Brought our models on-device to run directly on user devices (phones/laptops) - Grown to power thousands of production voice AI application It’s been incredibly fun building with such an amazing, hungry team of people with the best supporters. The journey is just beginning, and I couldn't be more excited about what's ahead. 💡

The Brain Wave Collective's most recent tech deep dive was on Cartesia... and they just raised a seed?! 😯 I genuinely thought they were further along. This is some seriously cool TTS tech. The voices are incredible, and the UI and API are a delight to use. We've tapped this tech for recent projects including a hackathon we won last month. I've sent people voices for fun and they describe the results as "Magic" Fantastic technology. Congratulations Cartesia! You're going to go far.