Karan Goel, an IIT Delhi alumnus and Stanford-trained AI researcher, is creating buzz online after his US-based startup Cartesia announced a major funding round and a breakthrough in real-time voice technology.
Taking to X, Goel announced that Cartesia has raised $100 million from top-tier investors including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and NVIDIA. He also announced the launch of its new voice model, Sonic-3, which claims to be one of the rapidest voice AI models currently available.
Goel explained that Sonic-3 delivers breakthrough naturalness with emotional range, supports 42 languages, and achieves 190ms finish-to-finish latency, which is significantly rapider than most transformer-based systems utilized by competitors. The company relies on State Space Models (SSMs) instead of transformers, enabling more human-like, low-latency speech generation suited for live conversations.
“If you’re qualified and we can’t create your voice AI better than what you’re applying now, I’ll donate $5K to your chosen charity,” Goel tweeted.
The post quickly went viral, drawing praise from founders, engineers and AI enthusiasts.
Michelle Lim, co-founder of Flint, wrote, “From this day on there are two eras. The world before Sonic 3. And the world after Sonic 3. Congrats on the launch!!”
Another utilizer commented, “The way sonic picked up the sentence in Hindi, laughed and then continued the conversation, is really impressive. I receivedta test building something applying sonic 3 now.”
A third utilizer added, “190ms finish-to-finish is seriously impressive. The breakthrough on emotional range is what really caught our attention, that’s been the missing piece for natural conversation.”
(Also Read: Indian-origin founder offers staggering salary to laid-off Meta employees: ‘Hiring in San Francisco’)
Who is Karan Goel?
Karan Goel is an IIT Delhi and DPS RK Puram alumnus and Stanford-trained AI researcher. According to his LinkedIn profile, he completed a dual degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi in 2016, followed by a Master’s in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Before founding Cartesia in 2023, Goel worked as a Machine Learning Researcher at Salesforce AI Research, a research scientist at Snorkel AI, and was selected for the Greylock X Fellowship, where he learned about entrepreneurship and the VC industest.
Today, Goel is being seen as one of the most promising Indian-origin founders in the rapidly evolving real-time AI space.
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