An Nvidia researcher couldn't stand how lifeless VTuber voices sounded. So he trained a voice model on a single 4090 GPU in his bedroom. A year later, his company says it had $21 million in annual recurring revenue. The company is Fish Audio, legally Hanabi AI, founded in 2025 by Shijia Liao and Rissa Cao. Liao, the chief scientist, was a video research engineer at Nvidia. Cao, the CEO, spent years in voice AI at Amazon Alexa and Meta. Liao open-sourced his model as Fish Speech, which passed 31,000 stars on GitHub. It spread through game developers, anime fans, and people dubbing characters for fun. Cao's diagnosis of text-to-speech is that getting the words right and getting the delivery right are different problems. "A voice built to read never learns to perform," she wrote. So Fish Audio controls the delivery. You type a script with tags like [whispering], [laughing], [sighing], or [pause], then clone a voice from a short clip or pick one from a library of more than 2 million voices. The company says it has 15,000+ natural-language controls, and that listeners preferred its S2.1 Pro model 66% of the time in blind tests against leading competitors. HeyGen uses its voices for avatars, and voice-agent companies like LiveKit use them for calls. Fish says enterprises and developers now make up two-thirds of its revenue. On July 28, its first anniversary, Fish Audio announced a $52 million seed led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with 359 Capital, Play Time, HF0, and others joining. The team had grown from 3 to 22 people. Cao said it raised to build more advanced models and serve enterprises. It also made its API free to developers through August. Fish says a rebuilt inference stack, running 8,000+ tokens per second on one H200, cut costs enough to give the model away. On October 13, it launched Drama 3, an open-weight model, meaning anyone can download it. You can control how a single word sounds and shift a voice mid-sentence. It went live the same day on Runway, Pika, OpenRouter, Vercel, ComfyUI, and Nous Research's Hermes Agent. Fish now says it has 15M+ users, up from 8M+ at the seed.