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Podonos Secures $2.4 Million to Enhance Voice AI Evaluation

In a significant move to bolster the evaluation of voice AI technology, Podonos, a San Francisco-based startup, has recently raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding. Led by Serac Ventures, this investment round also welcomed contributions from renowned firms such as Naver D2SF and KAIST Ventures. Founded in 2024 and established in Los Gatos, California, Podonos aims to bring structure, speed, and reliability to an often-overlooked aspect of voice AI development: evaluation.

The technology landscape is witnessing rapid advancements in voice AI, with applications spanning from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) to voice cloning and multilingual AI assistants. However, as this field evolves, it becomes increasingly crucial to determine the performance of these models in various sectors, such as finance, healthcare, legal, and gaming. Dr. Soohyun Bae, the founder and CEO of Podonos, emphasizes, "Everyone's focused on training bigger models, but rarely talks about how to measure what works in the real world. We are building the trust layer for all voice AI. Evaluation is where real improvements happen — and right now, it's slow, unscalable, and often unreliable."

To address these challenges, Podonos has developed a human-in-the-loop platform that enables AI teams to conveniently evaluate voice AI models. The platform assesses parameters like naturalness, similarity, emotion, and recognition accuracy, providing results in less than 12 hours. This quick turnaround is instrumental for teams that need to evaluate thousands of audio samples across multiple languages efficiently.

The growing need for precise performance measurement stems from the rapid adoption of voice-centric services. Many companies are exploring voice AI to enhance user interactions, but unaddressed issues can lead to detrimental customer experiences. Kevin Moore, a partner at Serac Ventures, shares insight into this dilemma: "One of the biggest challenges in developing and adopting voice AI is dealing with unknown potential issues. Finding and fixing them before the product launch is key to building customer trust. The technologies Podonos is developing make the unknowns clear and help customers launch their products with confidence."

With this latest funding, Podonos plans to strengthen its engineering team and further develop its post-analysis tools to better support users. The startup also has its sights set on key global markets, aiming to expand its offerings across the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia. By leveraging this capital, Podonos is positioning itself to become a leader in the voice AI evaluation infrastructure segment, helping shape the future of how these technologies are developed and assessed.

As the voice AI industry continues to evolve, the role and importance of evaluation will only increase, making Podonos's mission critical to the sector’s advancement. Through innovation and a focus on trust-building, Podonos not only aims to enhance voice AI development but also set a higher standard for quality and reliability in this burgeoning field. The company’s efforts to refine evaluation methods represent a pivotal step forward in ensuring that voice AI applications meet real-world needs and expectations, driving broader acceptance and deployment across various industries.