Fish Audio: A $52 Million AI Success Story

**Jayden** (0:00)
If you want to get access to this episode and my next 30 episodes, all ad free, so there'll be no ads on them, go check out my podcast AI Chat. You can go search for that on Spotify or Apple. It's AI Chat. I'm gonna post all of these news episodes, and I'm also posting interviews, like I just interviewed the CEO of Cohere. They've raised over a billion dollars for their AI model, talking about what they're gonna be spending the money on and the direction of the AI industry, along with all of this new stuff. So if you wanna go check it out with no ads for free, it is AI Chat.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
Welcome back to the podcast. Today, we are talking again about AI voice models. This new one called Fish Audio raised $52 million, giving it at a $21 million annual recurring revenue. So it's another AI voice model startup.
They just raised a ton of money, and there's a ton of money being made in a lot of different ways in this area. So we're gonna break that down for you today, talk about how we've even licensed this podcast to train AI models and made money. So we're gonna get all into that, but before we do, Jayden, why don't you tell them about our school community?

**Jayden** (1:02)
Yeah, every week we record a bonus piece of content over on our school community. This week we did a whole deep dive into my Facebook analytics.
I spent $2,000 running Facebook ads for AI Box in the last week or two, and so I break down what the results were, what I learned, how I'm scaling that, the winning ad formats. I literally show you guys all of the numbers and everything that I don't share post-publicly. So if you're interested in seeing that, go join the school community. It's $20 or it's $19 a month. You get access to that, plus tons of other stuff, including, by the way, I gotta mention this, if you have any interest in doing any sort of audio work, there's a way to get $6,000 in free 11 Labs credits. So $6,000 for free from 11 Labs, and I also have a whole video explaining how you can qualify and get that as well. So if you're interested, it's all in the school community. It's also free to join, but if you wanna get all of the bonus content, it's $19 a month, there's 600 members, and we'd love for you to be one of them. Okay, let's talk about what's going on with this story that you're mentioning with Fish Audio, because $52 million is a ton of money, but they did have a lot of annual recurring revenue. They're based in Palo Alto. They have more than 8 million users across their open source and hosted models. I think that's a key. It's really smart for them to make an open source model, release it. They probably got a ton of usage on that open source model, which they, of course, use to build their close source model. But then when they go and raise money, they're like, hey, look, we have 8 million users on our open source and closed source.
So anyways, it's kind of fun. They do the free product that's really popular, and they can use that metric. I think that's genius. And if you're raising money, making some sort of really valuable open source tool for people, I think is a really cool way to go.
This is their repository. It has 31,000 stars since it was launched last year. One interesting caveat that I will put on the GitHub stars, people literally raise money based off of how many stars their GitHub project has. And I am not advocating fraud. I'm more just like bringing awareness to it. You can go and buy GitHub stars. And sometimes I wonder if some of these companies will go and put out the project on GitHub, buy 50,000 GitHub stars, and then that starts the flywheel where everyone's like, oh, wow, a lot of people are starring this. So anyways, the stars do not matter.
The traction, the action, the community built around it, that's what actually matters. Hopefully, investors are smart enough to see that. But yeah, whenever I see a call out, 31,000 stars, I'm like, I mean, basically means nothing. But if it's all legit people, then it's a good indication.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:50)
Right now, they're library?

**Jayden** (3:51)
I'll go for it.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:52)
I'll go ahead. I just, I think this is an interesting company because, you know, in my mind, there's so many voice models out there already. Why would this one be able to jump in and claim that amount of market share? But this, I guess this is their sort of their angle. The CEO mentioned that there's companies like HeyGen, which they're optimizing the voice AI to power, like your AI avatar who wants like realism and professionalism. But it kind of sounds like their angle is more to make it open-source for video game designers, creators, indie developers. So, and they want to have more expression. That's kind of like what their claim to fame is, more expressive voices that may be a little bit more outrageous that you could apply to a character in a game. So, I think that's a really great, a really interesting business model or way to differentiate, because, you know, I think back to, this just came to my mind, but Grand Theft Auto, the video game, they had like these different radio stations you could flip through in the game while you're driving your car, and you could, there was like a chat, like a chat radio or whatever you call it, just talk radio, and they would have these ridiculous stories.