Karan Goel, a graduate of IIT Delhi and a Stanford-trained AI researcher, is making waves in the tech industry. His Silicon Valley-based startup, Cartesia, has recently announced a significant funding round, raising $100 million from prominent investors like Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, and NVIDIA.
The funding announcement coincides with the launch of Cartesia’s innovative voice model, Sonic-3, which is being hailed as one of the fastest voice AI models available today. Goel shared on X that Sonic-3 boasts impressive naturalness and emotional range, supporting 42 languages, and achieving an exceptionally low end-to-end latency of 190ms. This remarkable speed is attributed to Cartesia’s use of State Space Models (SSMs) instead of traditional transformers, enabling more human-like and responsive speech generation ideal for live conversations.
Goel’s confidence in Sonic-3 is so strong that he publicly tweeted, “If you’re qualified and we can’t make your voice AI better than what you’re using now, I’ll donate $5K to your chosen charity.” This bold claim has generated considerable excitement and praise from founders, engineers, and AI enthusiasts across the tech community.
Michelle Lim, co-founder of Flint, celebrated the launch by stating, “From this day on there are two eras. The world before Sonic 3. And the world after Sonic 3. Congrats on the launch!!” The model’s ability to seamlessly integrate Hindi and incorporate natural laughter into conversations has also drawn significant attention, with users expressing a strong desire to explore its capabilities.
Goel’s impressive academic and professional 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 co-founding Cartesia in 2023, he held positions as a Machine Learning Researcher at Salesforce AI Research and a research scientist at Snorkel AI. His selection for the Greylock X Fellowship further honed his entrepreneurial skills and understanding of the venture capital landscape.
Karan Goel is now recognized as one of the most promising Indian-origin founders in the rapidly advancing field of real-time AI, poised to make a significant impact.