Exclusive: AI voice startup Rime raises $5.5M seed
Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Rime, a startup that creates authentic-sounding AI voices, locked up a $5.5 million seed round led by Unusual Ventures, co-founder and CEO Lily Clifford tells Axios Pro.
Why it matters: Money is pouring in as startups jockey for position in the AI language and speech market.
How it works: Rime has helped create nuanced, curated voices that reflect the way real people talk.
- Rime built a proprietary dataset of speech-to-speech interactions — everything from Boston accents to Texas twang — to train its speech synthesis models.
Case in point: The startup's technology is already being used in more than 100 million phone conversations every month by more than 20 large enterprise customers, including brands like Domino's and Wingstop.
Between the lines: Investors have bet big on voice AI startups.
- In January, AI audio platform ElevenLabs closed a $250 million Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Growth at a post-money valuation of $3.3 billion. The startup allows creators, enterprises and others to use AI software to replicate voices in dozens of languages.
- In October, conversational AI startup Sierra, co-founded by ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, raised a $175 million round led by Greenoaks Capital that valued it at $4.5 billion.
What they're saying: "I think most companies want to know how we are different from Google, Amazon and Microsoft," Clifford says. "It's not often we come across other early-stage startups."
Zoom in: Founders You Should Know, Cadenza and a large group of angel investors also participated in the round.
The bottom line: As the AI voice wars heat up, startups will have to find ways to differentiate themselves.
