Phonic launches Phonic-1, tops Speech-to-Speech Index, raises $27.5M Series A
amos_gyamfi · x · 2026-11-07
Voice AI startup Phonic introduced Phonic-1, an end-to-end speech-to-speech model, alongside a $27.5M Series A led by First Round with Lux Capital, Felicis, and Definition (total funding $31.5M).
- Phonic-1 ranks #1 on the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Index, with the highest task success rate and lowest latency on agentic tasks, priced below GPT-Live-1 and Grok Voice 3.
- The company argues the end state of voice is speech-to-speech: today's cascade pipelines (ASR → LLM → TTS) lose tone, pauses, and nuance in transcription. Phonic has spent 2+ years reworking the full stack — data, pre-training, RL, kernels, infrastructure.
- A highlighted capability: calling tools in parallel while the caller is still talking.
- The poster also built a SwiftUI demo with it over a weekend.
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