Filed under Voice · 2022
Sonantic
2018 - 2022, 4 years old
A London voice-AI startup that synthesized emotional, human-sounding speech for games and film.
Sonantic spent four years building text-to-speech models that could perform anger, fear, and grief well enough to satisfy game studios and Hollywood. Its most public credit was recreating Val Kilmer's voice for Top Gun: Maverick after throat cancer left him unable to speak. Spotify bought the company in June 2022 for a reported 93 million euros and shut the standalone Sonantic product, folding the team and the technology into what would become Spotify's AI DJ feature in early 2023. The Sonantic platform stopped accepting new customers immediately after the deal and went dark for existing ones over the following months.
- Founded
- 2018-01
- Shut down
- 2022-06-13
- Funding raised
- $7M
- Years alive
- 4
- Founders
- Zeena Qureshi, John Flynn