Voice AI Needs an Accurate Evaluation Layer. Podonos Just Raised $2.4M to Build It

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Podonos, a startup building the infrastructure layer for evaluating voice AI, has raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding to bring structure and speed to one of the most overlooked parts of voice AI development: evaluation. The round was led by Serac Ventures, joined by Naver D2SF and KAIST Ventures.

Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Los Gatos, CA, Podonos offers a human-in-the-loop platform that enables AI teams to analyze voice AI models across naturalness, similarity, emotion, recognition accuracy, and more. Evaluations are turned around in under 12 hours, even across thousands of audio samples and multiple languages.

"Everyone's focused on training bigger models, but rarely talks about how to measure what works in the real world," said Dr. Soohyun Bae, founder and CEO of Podonos. "We are building the trust layer for all voice AI. Evaluation is where real improvements happen — and right now, it's slow, unscalable, and often unreliable."

With the explosion of voice AI including automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), voice cloning, and multilingual AI assistants, it is not yet clear whether these AI models will perform well in every vertical including finance, medical, legal, in-car conversations, and gaming. As a result, the need for accurate performance measurement and continuous improvement is growing fast. Podonos aims to be the go-to solution for product teams that need to iterate quickly and validate their voice conversations with AI accelerated human feedback — not just synthetic benchmarks.

"One of the biggest challenges in developing and adopting voice AI is dealing with unknown potential issues. Finding and fixing them before the product launch is key to building customer trust. The technologies Podonos is developing make the unknowns clear and help customers launch their products with confidence," said Kevin Moore, a partner at Serac Ventures.

The company plans to use the new capital to grow its engineering team, expand support for post-analysis tooling, and launch in key global markets including the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia.

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SOURCE Podonos