Cartesia, a San Francisco, CA-based developer of real-time multimodal intelligence for every device, raised $22m in funding.
The round, which brought total capital raised to $27m, was led by Index Ventures, with participation from A* Capital, Conviction, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and SV Angel, along with 90 angel investors including the Founders of Abridge, Airtable, Captions, Cognition, Cohere, Databricks, Datadog, Hugging Face, Hubspot, Infinitus, Llamaindex, Mercury, Mistral, Okta, Perplexity, Pika, Pinterest, Postman, Ramp, RunwayML, Snorkel, Sonos, Together AI, Tripedot Studios, Typeface, Vercel, Weaviate, Weights and Biases, and Zapier.
The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts.
Led by CEO Karan Goel, Cartesia provides state space models (SSMs) and platform that enable developers to build real-time, multimodal AI systems, starting with the generative voice API Sonic. It enables applications for a wide range of verticals like customer service, sales and marketing, robotics, healthcare, transportation, education, gaming, defense, security, and more.
In May 2024, Cartesia released Sonic, their low-latency voice model that generates expressive, lifelike speech, showcasing the power of their SSM architecture for real-time AI use cases. Due to the underlying SSM architecture, Sonic has been able to bring new features to the market, such as an on-device product that can run locally with no internet connection, and advanced controllability features like emotion, speed and prompting. The Sonic API already supports a variety of real-time use cases — customer service, debt collection, interview screening, voiceovers, interactive character voices — with hundreds of customers ranging from new startups to public companies.
The company is led by a group of Stanford researchers that includes Goel, his former labmates Albert Gu, Arjun Desai, and Brandon Yang, along with their former professor Chris Ré.
FinSMEs
13/12/2024