Hume AI
Emotional Voice AI
- Valuation
- ~$219M(Series B, 2024)
- Total Funding
- $130M+
- Profit Status
- Pre-profit,research stage
- Employees
- ~60
About Hume AI
Hume AI is a research lab and startup building emotionally intelligent voice AI. Its Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) is a conversational speech model that measures and responds to the emotion, tone, and prosody in a user's voice, aiming to make AI interactions more natural and human-aware. Founded by former Google DeepMind researcher Alan Cowen.
Company History
Founded 2021 by Alan Cowen, a former Google DeepMind and UC Berkeley researcher known for semantic space theory of emotion. Released the Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) in 2024 — the first conversational AI that responds to vocal emotion. Raised $50M Series B (Mar 2024) led by EQT Ventures at a $219M valuation. Launched Octave, an LLM-based text-to-speech model, and EVI 3 in 2025 with improved naturalness and voice customization.
Company Timeline
3 milestones- 2021Founded by Alan Cowen (ex-Google DeepMind)
- Mar 2024$50M Series B at $219M valuation; EVI launched
- 2025Octave TTS and EVI 3 released with voice customization
Funding Rounds
2 rounds| Date | Round | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Series A | $50M | Union Square Ventures, Comcast Ventures |
| Mar 2024 | Series B | $50M | EQT Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Nat Friedman |
Products & Services
3- Empathic Voice Interface (EVI)
- Expression Measurement API
- Octave TTS
People & ecosystem
Key People
- Alan Cowen (CEO, co-founder)
- Janet Ho (COO)
Key Investors
- EQT Ventures
- Union Square Ventures
- Nat Friedman
- Metaplanet
- Comcast Ventures
Competitive Landscape
- ElevenLabs
- OpenAI
- PlayHT
- Cartesia