Hume AI

Hume AI is a New York voice AI research company that sells emotionally expressive voice models, plus voice data, human-feedback and evaluation services, to developers, enterprises and frontier AI labs. Its products include the Octave text-to-speech model, the Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) speech-to-speech API, an Expression Measurement API and the Kairos platform for simulating and evaluating voice agents. It was founded in 2021 by former Google researcher Alan Cowen with Janet Ho and John Beadle, and raised a $12.7 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures in January 2023 and a $50 million Series B led by EQT Ventures in March 2024. In January 2026 it granted Google a non-exclusive licence to certain technologies; Cowen and about seven engineers joined Google DeepMind, and Andrew Ettinger, formerly chief revenue officer of Appen, became chief executive.