San Francisco-based voice AI startup Cartesia, founded in 2023 by Karan Goel and his team, is set to launch operations in Bengaluru, India, marking a significant step in its global expansion. CEO Karan Goel, an IIT Delhi alumnus, is spearheading this initiative, driven by the potential of the Indian market and its wealth of talent. The company is investing $2.5 million to establish its Indian office, which will focus on research and development and client support, tailoring solutions to meet the specific needs of Indian businesses.
Cartesia specializes in building real-time voice AI agents, offering a platform that provides enterprises and startups with low-latency and scalable voice AI infrastructure. Their technology is designed to generate expressive, lifelike speech in real-time, significantly reducing latency and improving the responsiveness of voice interactions. Cartesia's flagship product, Sonic, is a voice model known for its speed and ability to operate locally on devices without an internet connection. The company's AI voice platform is powered by advanced State Space Model (SSM) technology, which enables seamless integration of AI voices, voice cloning, and voice infilling into interactive applications.
Cartesia has garnered attention for its innovative approach to voice AI, utilizing SSMs that offer advantages over traditional transformer-based models, including better long-term memory and lower latency. The company's technology supports multiple languages and offers voice customization options. Cartesia's voice cloning technology preserves unique accents and audio styles, unleashing creative potential for users.
The company has secured substantial funding, raising a total of $86 million over two rounds. A Series A round in March 2025, led by Kleiner Perkins, brought in $64 million, while an earlier seed round raised $22 million. Investors include Index Ventures, Lightspeed, A*, Factory, Greycroft, Dell Technologies Capital, and Samsung Ventures. This financial backing is fueling Cartesia's expansion and ongoing development of its AI models.
Cartesia's technology has a wide range of potential applications, including customer support, digital avatars, healthcare, robotics, and gaming. The company's focus on low-latency streaming makes it well-suited for conversational AI and voice agents, where response time is critical. Cartesia aims to transform industries by making interactive and real-time AI accessible on any device.
Karan Goel's vision for Cartesia is to build the next generation of real-time, multimodal intelligence. Goel's background includes a dual degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi, a Master's in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Before founding Cartesia, he worked as a Machine Learning Researcher at Salesforce AI Research and a Research Scientist at Snorkel AI. Goel's expertise and leadership are driving Cartesia's mission to revolutionize voice AI and its applications across various sectors.
