Cartesia raises $64M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and launches Sonic 2.0

Cartesia/Sonic

Cartesia raised $64 million led by Kleiner Perkins, for $91 million raised in total, and released Sonic 2.0 on its state space architecture. The model is twice the size of the first Sonic yet faster: about 90 ms to first audio, 40 ms for the Turbo version.

• In blind tests on 100 held-out voices, 1.5x as many people preferred Sonic 2.0 over the next-best provider (company test).
• Added a voice changer and infill for editing words inside existing audio.
• Founded out of Stanford's AI Lab in 2023 by Karan Goel, Albert Gu, Arjun Desai and Brandon Yang.