We are excited to share that Podonos has raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding to tackle one of the most overlooked challenges in voice AI — evaluation. The round was led by Serac Ventures with participation from Naver D2SF and KAIST Ventures.
Why Evaluation Matters
Voice AI is advancing at an incredible pace. Text-to-speech, voice cloning, speech recognition, and multilingual assistants are becoming part of our daily lives. But one critical question remains: how do we know if these models are truly ready for the real world?
Bigger models are being trained, but evaluation often lags behind. Traditional approaches are slow, unscalable, and inconsistent. This creates blind spots, and issues are often discovered only after products are deployed. For industries like healthcare, finance, or automotive, those risks are too high.
How Podonos Helps
Podonos was founded to close this gap. Our human-in-the-loop platform evaluates voice AI models across naturalness, similarity, emotion, recognition accuracy, and more. Evaluations are completed in under 12 hours, even across thousands of audio samples and multiple languages.
This speed gives product teams a feedback loop they can act on. Instead of waiting weeks, they can iterate quickly, validate their results, and build with confidence.
As our founder and CEO, Dr. Soohyun Bae, explains:
“Everyone is focused on training bigger models, but few talk about how to measure what works in the real world. Evaluation is where real improvements happen.”
What This Funding Means
With this funding, we will expand our engineering team, strengthen post-analysis tooling, and launch in key global markets including the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Kevin Moore, partner at Serac Ventures, shared:
“One of the biggest challenges in adopting voice AI is dealing with unknown issues. Identifying and fixing them before launch is critical to building customer trust. Podonos makes the unknowns clear and helps customers launch with confidence.”
Looking Ahead
We are building the trust layer for voice AI. This funding helps us move faster toward a future where models are not just powerful but also reliable, transparent, and ready for real-world use.
If you are building with voice AI and want to ensure your models perform the way they should, get in touch with us at hello@podonos.com.
