Cartesia
Headquarters
San Francisco, CAFounded
2023CEO / Founder
Bharat VasanEmployees
11-50Funding
Series B — $31MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.9/10Website
cartesia.ai/
Profile updated
About Cartesia
Cartesia is an AI voice infrastructure company founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company was co-founded by Bharat Vasan and a team of researchers focused on building low-latency speech synthesis models for production applications.
Cartesia's primary product is Sonic, a streaming text-to-speech API designed for real-time use cases such as AI voice agents, interactive applications, and conversational interfaces. Sonic-3, the company's latest model, supports over 40 languages and includes expressive capabilities such as laughter and emotional range. The API is built around low-latency streaming, targeting developers who need sub-100ms response times for voice-enabled products.
Cartesia raised a $31 million Series A round, with participation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz. The company operates with a small team and competes in the text-to-speech API market alongside providers such as ElevenLabs and OpenAI's voice offerings. Its GitHub organization hosts open-source tooling related to its speech models.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Cartesia
All products by Cartesia reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Cartesia
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Cartesia's product on their own terms. They disagreed by 1.0 points — The Finance Lead was the hardest to convince, The Domain Strategist the most positive.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Cartesia competes with, and how they differ.
ElevenLabs is the larger incumbent in generative voice, with a broad consumer/creator product suite (dubbing, audiobooks) alongside its API; Cartesia is narrower, positioning on ultra-low-latency (~190ms) real-time conversational voice built on state space models rather than transformers.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Deepgram is built primarily around speech-to-text transcription infrastructure for enterprises; Cartesia's core product is real-time text-to-speech and full-duplex voice generation.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
AssemblyAI focuses on speech-to-text and audio intelligence APIs (summarization, sentiment); Cartesia focuses on the generation side — expressive, low-latency speech output for voice agents.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Speechmatics specializes in accurate multilingual speech recognition for enterprise and government use cases; Cartesia competes on the voice-generation and real-time-agent side of the stack.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Hume AI differentiates on emotional-expression measurement and empathic voice interfaces layered with its own models; Cartesia competes primarily on raw latency and cost efficiency of its SSM-based architecture.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Cartesia's history, with sources.
- Funding
Series B — $100M led by Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and NVIDIA
Cartesia raised a $100 million Series B, with NVIDIA joining as a new strategic investor, alongside the launch of its Sonic-3 real-time voice model (42 languages, ~190ms latency).
aivoicenewsletter.com - Funding
Series A — $64M led by Kleiner Perkins
Cartesia raised a $64 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, with Index Ventures, Lightspeed, Dell Technologies Capital and Samsung Ventures also participating, bringing total funding to $91 million.
finance.yahoo.com - Funding
Seed round — $27M led by Index Ventures
Cartesia raised a $27 million seed round led by Index Ventures to commercialize state space models (SSMs) as a lower-cost alternative to transformer architectures for real-time voice AI.
pulse2.com - Founded
Founded by Stanford AI Lab researchers
Karan Goel, Albert Gu, Arjun Desai, Brandon Yang and advisor Christopher Ré founded Cartesia in September 2023, commercializing State Space Model research from Stanford's AI Lab.
research.contrary.com
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