Cartesia’s $100M Sonic‐3 Leap

November 04, 2025

🔊 Soundcheck

  • Cartesia’s $100M Sonic‑3 Leap

  • Voice AI Turns Calls into Care with $11M Backing

  • UST Backs aiOla for Voice AI Expansion

Read time: 4 minutes

🔥 Hot Mic

Big moves, deep dives, and standout stories.

Cartesia, the Silicon Valley startup founded by Stanford AI veterans Karan Goel and Albert Gu, just announced a $100 million funding round from top-tier investors including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, and NVIDIA. The raise powers the debut of Sonic‑3, a real‑time voice AI model designed to feel deeply human.

Sonic‑3 delivers expressive conversational AI with emotional nuance, laughter, and tonal variation. It achieves ultra-low latency — around 90 ms model delay and 190 ms end-to-end response — and supports 42 languages, enabling natural voice interactions worldwide.

Instead of relying on transformer architectures, Sonic‑3 runs on State Space Models (SSMs), which emulate human memory by retaining conversational context efficiently. Thousands of enterprises already leverage Cartesia’s platform, and the new funding will drive engineering expansion, product scaling, and global reach.

Key Points:

  • Cartesia raised $100M from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA

  • Sonic‑3 delivers expressive voice with emotional nuance and global language support

  • Model latency is 90 ms, full response in 190 ms for seamless real‑time interaction

  • Built on efficient State Space Models, not traditional transformer architectures

Takeaway: Cartesia’s massive funding and launch of its emotion‑rich, multilingual, ultra‑fast Sonic‑3 model signal a significant leap for real‑time voice AI—rebuffing transformer norms and setting a new industry benchmark for speed, authenticity, and scale.

Popai’s recent $11 million raise underscores a surge in demand for Voice AI designed specifically for healthcare. By listening to the roughly 65% of patient engagement happening over phone calls, Popai creates structured, compliant documentation and actionable workflows without burdening staff.

Already adopted by providers like Essen Healthcare and Clover Health, the platform uses healthcare‑trained AI to surface clinical, operational, and social insights from calls. It then turns those insights into real‑time interventions—from flagging risks to scheduling follow‑ups—helping organizations shift from reactive to proactive care.

Key Points:

  • Raised $11 million led by Team8 and NEA.

  • Captures about 65% of patient interactions happening over phone calls.

  • Generates compliant documentation with over 20% performance gains.

  • Turns call insights into immediate actions like alerts and scheduling.

Takeaway: Popai Health’s Voice AI turns everyday patient calls into a proactive clinical engine—making those once‑ignored conversations a strategic driver of care, insights, and efficiency.

UST invests in aiOla to scale hands-free voice‑to‑workflow automation across frontline industries globally.

UST has made a strategic investment in aiOla, an Israeli voice AI lab, to accelerate the global rollout of hands‑free voice‑driven automation for frontline workers. The move builds on their collaboration under UST Spark. The partnership aims to transform operations in healthcare, retail, manufacturing, automotive, and life sciences with voice‑agentic workflows. aiOla’s platform converts spoken inputs into structured, auditable workflows, overcoming challenges like noisy environments, jargon, and accents. The combined strengths of UST’s enterprise reach and aiOla’s deep tech voice‑AI are set to make frontline processes faster, more accurate, and richly data‑driven.

Key Points:

  • UST invested in aiOla following incubation via UST Spark.

  • aiOla converts spoken shorthand into structured, auditable workflows.

  • Platform works across noisy, jargon‑heavy environments and multiple languages.

  • Partnership targets industries like healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and automotive.

Takeaway: UST’s investment in aiOla signals a major step toward scaling voice‑agentic AI for frontline operations, promising faster, error‑resistant data capture and richer operational insights across complex enterprise environments.

🎙️ Mic Drop

What else is making noise in voice AI.

RingCentral launches agentic voice AI; core features live for US, UK, Canada users; early customer uptick already reported. (stocktitan.net)

TEN marks one year as robust open-source option for real-time conversational AI; key for rapid prototyping and small team adoption. (financialcontent.com)

AudioCodes beats revenue forecasts by leveraging conversational AI and voice services; signals strong B2B growth momentum. (finimize.com)

Amazon Music incorporates new Alexa+ assistant, improving user experience in music search, playlist creation, and hands-free commands. (findarticles.com)

Popai Health will apply funds to expand healthcare voice AI, automating patient call analysis for efficient care management. (prnewswire.com)

Step-by-step guide for deploying Dia-1.6B, an open-source alternative to ElevenLabs, enhances flexibility for on-prem TTS production. (vocal.media)

Nexla introduces Express, integrating conversational AI to drastically streamline enterprise data engineering and workflow automation. (siliconangle.com)

Prosper secures $5M to automate healthcare admin tasks with voice AI, targeting billing, scheduling, and revenue management. (healthcareittoday.com)

Smallest.ai funding will accelerate rollout of multilingual enterprise voice solutions, focusing on emerging markets and Indian languages. (moneycontrol.com)

Synthflow AI appoints experienced revenue leader, highlighting enterprise voice AI market traction and go-to-market expansion focus. (financialcontent.com)

Businesses across industries improve engagement and cut costs via personalized, real-time customer interaction using conversational AI. (programminginsider.com)

Conversational AI is streamlining patient onboarding, automating access tasks, and enhancing compliance for healthcare providers. (hitconsultant.net)

K League’s AI-driven voice commentary pilot offers accessible information for visually impaired football fans, expanding in 2026. (chosun.com)