Fish Audio: clip-makers on TikTok use it for "voice watermarks", but behind it is a company that raised $52M
What it is An AI voiceover app: type text, pick a voice, and generate speech with tone and emotion. It can also clone voices, with 200 million+ user-uploaded voices to choose from.
Why it blew up The web version already had 8M users; TikTok editing circles popularized using character voices as "voice watermarks" on their work, and tutorials all say to use Fish Audio, which carried it onto teens' phones in Brazil, the Russian-speaking world, and Vietnam.
CHow you could ride it You can't ride it as-is; to follow, go only for the narrow need of "voice watermarks": templated original voices, cheap per-use pricing, direct export into CapCut, spread through editing-tutorial channels, and stay away from real celebrity voices.
- Data (updated daily) · Launched 2026-08-20 · US store rating 1,399 · 11-08 charted in 41 stores · Launched 2026-08-25 · 11-07 installs 678,478
iOS · Overall Top Free rank · by store Data 2026-11-03 → 2026-11-04 (2 days, 2 observations). Lower rank is higher; gaps mean it wasn't charted that dayiOS · Best category rank · US store Data 2026-10-28 → 2026-11-05 (9 days, 9 observations). Best rank across each day's category chartsiOS · Number of stores charted (top 200 on any chart) Data 2026-10-31 → 2026-11-04 (5 days, 4 observations)Android · Total installs worldwide Data 2026-10-29 → 2026-11-07 (10 days, 10 observations). Google's detail page only refreshes install counts every other day, so a flat day doesn't mean nobody installed.Android · Ratings count (cumulative) Data 2026-10-29 → 2026-11-07 (10 days, 10 observations)
Fish Audio's iPhone version launched in Aug 20, and two and a half months later it was on the utilities charts in over thirty countries, with Brazil reaching the utilities Top Grossing. It looks like an indie dev's hit, but it's really a voice-AI company with $21M in annual revenue porting its web app to phones. Where its users came from is worth studying; the product itself can't be copied. Below: what it is, why it took off in Brazil and Russian-speaking markets, who's riding its coattails, and what you can take away.
A "this is our secret" video
On 2026 Nov 1, TikTok edit account @zydexhxllw posted a tutorial captioned: "This is the secret just for you 🤫 || Want to learn how to do this wm? || Site: fish audio || It's actually super easy". wm means watermark. As of 11-06 the post has 96k views.
Clipping culture (edit accounts making montages of anime, athletes and game characters, many run by teens) has a trend: opening each video with a "voice watermark," a line in a character's or celebrity's voice that says your account name, sometimes with a scream. The tools for it almost all share one name. Searching "fish audio watermark" turns up: a Russian account @x.dark.aep, "July's watermark video," 630k views; a Vietnamese tutorial from @ken_edit_100, 240k views; a French post from @killmadethis, "Three watermark tutorials | App name: Fish audio," 200k views; and a US post from @watuedits, "My scream watermark, free for your edits," 230k views. TikTok even has a roundup page called "Best Voices for Watermarks on Fish Audio."
On Nov 6, @x.dark.aep posted again: "Who's making one?! …… Site name: 'fish audio.' Follow and I'll make you one of these voiceovers." Someone is already taking orders with it.
What it is
An AI voiceover tool: type text, pick a voice, and generate speech with tone. You can also clone your own voice from a 5-second recording, add tags like "[whispers]" inside sentences to control emotion, and it supports 80 languages. The most distinctive part is the voice library: users have uploaded over 2M voices, including many from anime characters, streamers and celebrities.
It's built by Hanabi AI, formerly the open-source project Fish Speech, which had 31k stars on GitHub. In 2026 July it announced a $52M seed round, and said it had $21M in ARR, 8M users and a team of 22 (official blog 7-27, TechCrunch 7-28). Two-thirds of revenue comes from businesses and developers; customers include HeyGen and LiveKit.
The app is free to download. The Plus subscription is $14.99 a month or $131.99 a year, with credit packs at $4.99 / $9.99 (reported by AlphaSignal 8-26). Free quotas are tight. In Russia in October, two one-star Samsung reviews complained about the same thing: "After 3–4 uses, you have to pay."
How big it is now
| Metric | Sources | |
|---|---|---|
| US App Store | 1,443 ratings, 4.77 stars; 10-28 to 11-05 roughly 21 new ratings a day; utilities free chart rank 156–200; 11-06 dropped out of the top 200 | App Store,11-06 |
| Brazil App Store | 1,343 ratings, 4.85 score; about 24 new ratings a day. Utilities rank 50–71 in the free chart; Top Grossing best 10-28 at #30, 11-06 at #56 | App Store,11-06 |
| Russia / Japan | 225 / 197 ratings; utilities Top Grossing best at #38 / #66 | App Store,11-06 |
| Google Play | Listed on 8-25, 678k installs, +7k over the last 125 days | Google Play,11-06 |
| Website fish.audio | September traffic 8.4M–13.1M (two third-party estimates); the company says web plus app is about 25M visits a month | AlphaMoat, Semrush; co-founder on LinkedIn 10-05 |
Using ElevenLabs as a benchmark: its iPhone app has 24k ratings in the US, far more than Fish. But in Brazil, Fish adds 177 ratings a week, already more than ElevenLabs' 148. On Google Play, Fish's weekly installs are a bit over half of ElevenLabs' (11-06). In other words, Fish's mobile app took off in non-English, younger-skewing markets.
Where users come from
First, TikTok edit culture, organic. The watermark tutorials above were all posted by users, not bought. The geography matches: Brazil, Russian-speaking regions, Vietnam, Italy, Mexico, Saudi Arabia. These aren't traditional strongholds for AI tools, but they're where Fish's iPhone app ranks best.
Second, character and celebrity voice memes. The #fishaudio tag is full of voiceover memes with Markiplier, MrBeast and South Park characters, one with 3.24M views. A Spanish tutorial from Mexico has 190k views, and many videos simply say "the site is called fish.audio." Rivals like ElevenLabs are strict about such voices, so people wanting "a certain character's voice" come here.
Third, the website already had millions of users. The official app captures existing demand; it didn't start from zero. The company says "Fish Audio" is searched on Google about 27k times a month. Before the official app launched, the App Store already had knockoff apps using the name to divert searches (see below), which suggests people search for it in the store too (inference).
Fourth, open source and developer word of mouth. Open-sourcing Fish Speech drew a group of developers. Reviews and Reddit threads mostly say "several times cheaper than ElevenLabs." Runway added its new model to its platform in September. Coverage of the July funding round and concurrent free trials and half-price offers added more exposure, and the iPhone app launched on the back of that.
Ads: none found. No ads turned up in the Meta Ad Library. Whether it ran ads elsewhere is unknown.
Who's riding its name
Searching "fish audio" on the US App Store (11-06) turns up a string of unofficial apps ahead of the official one:
- "Fish Audio: AI Voice Clone tts," developer Rizwan Rashid, listed 2026-06-07, two and a half months before the official app. 310 US ratings. A same-named app on Google Play also sells "celebrity imitation."
- "Fish: Text to Speech AI Audio," Victoria Turcan, listed 7-08, 325 ratings
- "Fish Audio: AI Voice Generator" (7-22), "Fish audio- ai voice clone tts" (8-27), plus Fish AI, Fish Labs, Fish Audio AI Studio and others
All the same play: before the official app existed, people searched the brand name, so they wrapped a generic text-to-speech API in an app with a borrowed name and sold subscriptions. Others are doing this, and it could be taken down at any time after a complaint.
Why this one
- An existing website base first: 8M users and tens of millions of monthly visits. People were waiting the moment the app went live.
- One concrete use brought it into teens' phones: the "voice watermark" only needs a few minutes on a phone to make one line and import it into CapCut, so it's inherently a mobile need.
- A user-uploaded voice library is something no one else has: "You can find any character's voice" is why entertainment users stick with it. That's also its biggest risk: the UK actors' union Equity publicly sent a letter in June 2026 demanding it take down unauthorized actor voices.
- Good and cheap models: this explains the two-thirds of revenue from businesses and developers, and matters less for mobile growth.
If it were you
Verdict: Fish Audio itself can't be copied. Its advantages are its in-house models, the voice library from millions of user uploads and an existing website base, none of which followers get. Revenue and funding are public, and there's already a crowd of name-riding apps. What can be taken are two things: its playbook, and the specific clipping-culture need for "voice watermarks."
Who it fits: small teams of 1–2 people already building AI tools who understand TikTok edit culture, or anyone with a type of user content that can be spread across "one page per piece of content" who wants to borrow the approach.
Who it doesn't fit: anyone building a general AI voiceover app to compete head-on with Fish and ElevenLabs; anyone relying on celebrity and character voices to draw traffic (Fish has funding to fight lawsuits, you don't); anyone relying on the "Fish Audio" brand name (more than 8 apps have already taken it, and complaints are coming).
How to do it: if you touch "voice watermarks," keep it narrow: a phone-only tool just for watermarks. Enter your account name, pick original voices from templates like "scream / whisper / news anchor / prank," get audio in one tap and import straight into CapCut. Use voices from commercially licensed APIs (including Fish's own paid API) or open-source models, and only synthesize your own voice or voices the owner has authorized, never real celebrities. Your users are teens with low spending power, so price in small single-use packs of a few dollars, not a monthly $15 like Fish, whose Russian one-star reviews show what happens otherwise. The more useful thing to copy is the playbook: use an open-source model as the entry point and charge for the hosted version; make every user-uploaded voice (or other content) auto-generate a searchable page, which is how Fish built 2M long-tail pages.
How to get users: reverse how it spread. Find small tutorial accounts in clipping culture and have them post "how I made my watermark," naming your tool in the caption. Build a public "best watermark voices" roundup page that people copy from each other. You can start without ads, but only if the output is recognizable inside the video itself (inference).
Timing: clipping trends turn over fast. This watermark wave ran from May to November, with new tutorials still posted at the end. If you want to try it, be live before early 2027, since by then the format will likely have moved on.
Signs you're wrong: ① Fish's iPhone app rating growth in Brazil and Russia slows noticeably within a month or two, and new "fish audio watermark" videos on TikTok thin out. That means the watermark wave is fading and there's no narrow tool to build. ② Fish takes down character voices at scale over copyright pressure, and entertainment users start looking for substitutes. That's the opening for a narrow tool, so move fast. ③ CapCut launches its own "voice watermark" template, and this path closes.
iOS store page ↗Android store page ↗
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one ElevenLabs iOS Web 2022; iOS 2025-06-24 Valuation $11B; iOS US 24,186 ratings; Play 12M installs Fish is several times cheaper, better in multiple languages and with emotion tags, and has an open community voice library (characters / celebrities). ElevenLabs is strict, so entertainment and meme users go to Fish. Speechify / ElevenReader / NaturalReader iOS 2017 / 2024 / 2020 Speechify US 528k ratings These are reading and PDF read-aloud tools; Fish makes voiceover assets and clones voices. Jammable (formerly Voicify) / TopMediai / Uberduck Web Around 2023 Semrush lists these as the closest traffic competitors to fish.audio. Leans toward AI covers and celebrity sound effects; Fish has its own model, with cloning, multiple languages and emotion control. Voices AI / Celebrity Voice Changer / Parrot AI iOS 2016–2023 27k / 33k / 140k ratings Voice changers and celebrity-template toys; Fish can clone any voice and write any line. MiniMax Speech / Cartesia / Qwen3-TTS Other 2024–2026 Big-model company APIs Mostly sell APIs; no consumer-facing voice community. CapCut built-in TTS Big-company features Already there CapCut iOS 1.12M ratings Fixed voices, no cloning; the TikTok tutorials are literally "generate in Fish, import into CapCut." Fish Speech / CosyVoice / F5-TTS / IndexTTS Open source 2024– Fish Speech 31k stars Requires self-hosting; Fish uses its own open-source project as the entry point and charges for the hosted version. - Where users come from
- Verified TikTok clipping-culture "voice watermark" tutorials (UGC): searching "fish audio watermark" turns up Brazil @tutor_mest 278k views, @zydexhxllw 95k (2026-11-01), Vietnam @ken_edit_100 240k, France @killmadethis 196k, Russian account @x.dark.aep 629k; TikTok has the roundup page "Best Voices for Watermarks on Fish Audio."
- Verified TikTok character and celebrity voice memes: under #fishaudio, voiceover videos with Markiplier, MrBeast, South Park and others; @fish_audi0 has one with 3.24M views; Mexican @edulx7.cc tutorial 189k; captions often say "the site is called fish.audio."
- Verified Open-source community and developer word of mouth: Fish Speech has 31k GitHub stars; 564 Product Hunt votes; Reddit and reviews compare it with ElevenLabs; Runway 2026-09 integrates S2.1 Pro.
- Verified Funding media coverage + free trials: TechCrunch / PR Newswire covered the $52M seed round (2026-07-28); API free until end of August, creator plan 50% off, 3 months free on migration; iOS app listed 8-20, AlphaSignal 8-26 coverage.
- Inference Brand search / website users moving to the app: the company says "Fish Audio" is searched on Google about 27k times a month and the web plus app gets about 25M visits a month. Before the official app launched, knockoffs had already used the brand name to divert searches.
- Inferred SEO long-tail pages: every community voice has a fish.audio/m/<id>/ "XX AI Voice Generator" page; Probedex shows 45% of traffic is direct
- Inferred Paid ads: Meta Ad Library has no fish.audio / Hanabi records (the library's coverage is limited, so no hits doesn't mean no spend)
Why Fish Audio (iOS id6789369290, Hanabi AI Inc.) is taking off
Research date 2026-11-06. Storefronts checked: all 34 storefronts where this app is charted in our database, with detailed breakdowns for us / br / jp / ru / it; Google Play library; Meta Ad Library; TikTok (TikHub), X (x-radar), web search (Jina / Exa).
First, a correction to the data card
- The data card merged the official app and a knockoff into one product. The
producttable uses a rule of bundle prefix + name prefix, which combined the officialcom.fishaudio.app(id6789369290, Hanabi AI Inc., released 2026-08-20) andcom.fishaudio.studio(id6775396336, developer Rizwan Rashid, released 2026-06-07, named "Fish Audio: AI Voice Clone tts") under one product_id. The card's "listed 2026-06-07, live about 5 months" is actually the knockoff's date; the official app was only listed about 2.5 months ago (iTunes lookup: releaseDate 2026-08-20, current version updated 1.2.3,2026-11-03). Several small-country chart positions on the card, such as sv and ai (6016 category), also came from the knockoff (appstore library app_profile, 2026-11-06). - 11-06's overall rating dropping from 4326 to 2989 wasn't ratings being deleted. The official version fell off the US free Utilities chart that day (us 11-05 is still at #200), and the 1,443 US ratings no longer count toward the "combined across charted countries" total. iTunes lookup (2026-11-06): us 1,443 ratings at 4.77 stars, br 1,343 ratings at 4.85 stars, ru 225, jp 197.
- This is not a small indie app. It's the official mobile version from a voice AI company that raised a $52M seed round and says it has $21M in ARR.
What it is
Fish Audio is an AI voice generation platform: text-to-speech, cloning a voice from 5 seconds of audio, designing voices from text prompts, and multi-character dialogue, in 80+ languages. You can drop emotion tags like [whispers] right into a sentence. Under the hood it runs its own S2 / S2.1 Pro models, and it grew out of Fish Speech, the open-source project on GitHub with 31k+ stars. The iOS app brings the web product to your phone: browse community voices uploaded by 200 million+ users, clone, export and share. Pricing: Plus is $14.99/month or $131.99/year, plus credit packs at $4.99 and $9.99 (AlphaSignal, 2026-08-26). Free users hit a paywall after a few tries (Russian-store reviews 2026-10-24 and 10-29 complain about "being asked to pay after 3–4 uses").
Data: how big it is now
- Company level (public): $52M seed round (led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with follow-ons from HF0, 645 Ventures and others), $21M ARR, 8M+ users, 22 employees (official blog 2026-07-27; TechCrunch 2026-07-28). 2026-03 HF0 posted that ARR passed $12M in 10 months, with 5M users and 1.5M+ monthly actives (HF0 LinkedIn). Enterprise and developers make up two-thirds of revenue, with customers including HeyGen, Sanas and LiveKit.
- Traffic: fish.audio 2026–September visits estimated at 13.1M by Semrush and 8.42M by AlphaMoat (14.9% from the US). The company itself says "web plus app is about 25M visits a month, up roughly 18x in a year, and 'Fish Audio' is searched on Google 27k times a month" (co-founder LinkedIn 2026-10-05).
- iOS (appstore library): the official app is charted in the Utilities category in 34 storefronts. 2026-10-28→11-05 US ratings went from 1,232 to 1,399 (about 21 a day, Utilities free chart 156–200). Brazil 1,105→1,321 (about 24 a day, Utilities free 50–71; 11-06 reached #56 on the Utilities Top Grossing chart, and 10-28 once hit #30 Top Grossing). Russia 159→222 (best Utilities Top Grossing rank #38). Japan 171→196 (Utilities Top Grossing #66–159). Saudi Arabia 7 days +44.
- Bigger on Android (Google Play library): the official
ai.hanabi.fishaudio(listed 2026-08-25) has 678,478 installs, +7 over the last 125,405 days. In the same period, the official ElevenLabs app had 12M installs and +7 over 219,727 days. In other words, Fish Audio's weekly Android growth is already more than half of ElevenLabs'. - Compared with iOS: the official ElevenLabs app (listed 2025-06-24) has 24,186 US ratings and +7 over 633 days; Brazil 3,550 / +148 (appstore library 11-06). Fish Audio's weekly rating growth in Brazil (177) has already passed ElevenLabs' (148).
Competitors
| Competitors | Where | Launched | Scale | How Fish Audio differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Web / iOS / Android / API | 2022 web; iOS 2025-06 | Valued at $11B (TechCrunch 2026-02); US iOS 24k ratings; Play 12M installs | Stronger and more expensive on English voice quality and enterprise branding; lacks Fish's 2M-voice community UGC library and polices "celebrity / character voices" strictly, so entertainment and meme users go to Fish |
| ElevenReader / Speechify / NaturalReader / Voice Dream | iOS and more | 2012–2024 | Speechify US 528k ratings | Focused on "read books / read PDFs aloud to you," not voiceover assets |
| Jammable (formerly Voicify) / TopMediai / Uberduck | Web | Around 2023 | Semrush lists these as the closest traffic competitors to fish.audio. | Focused on AI covers and celebrity voices; weaker than Fish's in-house models and multilingual performance |
| Voices AI(Fiedler Tech)/ Celebrity Voice Changer / Parrot AI | iOS | 2016–2023 | 27k / 33k / 140k ratings | Voice changer and celebrity soundboard toy, template-driven, no custom cloning or emotion control |
| MiniMax Speech, Cartesia, Qwen3-TTS and others | API / web | 2024–2026 | Big tech or large model companies | Mainly sells API access to developers, with no consumer-facing voice community |
| Built-in CapCut TTS / voices | Big-company features | Already there | CapCut iOS 1.12M ratings | Convenient for editing, but voices are fixed and can't be cloned; Fish's TikTok tutorials literally say "generate in Fish, import into CapCut" |
| Open source: Fish Speech itself, CosyVoice, F5-TTS, IndexTTS | Open source | 2024– | Fish Speech 31k stars | You have to self-host; Fish used open source to build its front door |
Growth: where users come from
- The TikTok edit-community "voice watermark" trend (the biggest driver, confirmed). On TikTok, edit / AMV creators (many of them teens) have popularized opening videos with a "voice watermark": a famous or anime character's voice reading out their handle. The tool is Fish Audio. Searching "fish audio watermark" turns up tutorials: Brazil @tutor_mest 278k views (2026-05), @zydexhxllw 95k (2026-11-01); Vietnam @ken_edit_100 240k; @feran4.cc 240k; France @killmadethis 196k, "App name: Fish audio"; UK @djfartsucker69 330k; Uzbekistan Russian-language account @x.dark.aep 629k views (2026-07, "#водянойзнак"); US @watuedits 229k. TikTok also has an official aggregator page, "Best Voices for Watermarks on Fish Audio." fish.audio itself hosts user-uploaded "WaterMark voice" and "Three watermark" voice pages. This explains why the official app is taking off in places like Brazil, Russia, Italy, Vietnam, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, which aren't traditional AI tool strongholds.
- Character / celebrity voice memes (confirmed). Under the #fishaudio tag there are lots of Markiplier, MrBeast, South Park, Cookie Run kingdom, Alastor and other character voiceover memes; @fish_audi0 has one video with 3.24M views; Mexico's @edulx7.cc "fish audio voice tutorial" 189k, @kiwwi__rants dubbing a CapCut rant video 107k; many captions just say "the site is fish.audio." This is organic user content, not paid promotion.
- Open-source community + developer word of mouth (confirmed). Fish Speech has 31k stars on GitHub; Product Hunt 564 votes (2025-10); Reddit r/TextToSpeech has lots of "Fish vs ElevenLabs" threads, and many review articles push "4–11x cheaper than ElevenLabs, wins blind tests." Runway 2026-09 integrated the S2.1 Pro model into its platform (X @runwayml).
- Funding press + limited-time free offers (confirmed). TechCrunch, PR Newswire and Yahoo covered the $52M seed round. At the same time, the company announced the S2.1 Pro API free through the end of August, 50% off creator plans, and 3 free months for users migrating from other tools (official blog). The iOS version launched in August 20, right after this wave of coverage; AlphaSignal covered the iOS launch in August 26.
- Brand search + store search (inferred). The company says "Fish Audio" gets 27k Google searches a month. Before the official app existed, knockoff apps already used "Fish Audio" as their name to grab the search traffic (see below), which shows the term "fish audio" already had substantial search volume in the store, and the official launch picked it up directly.
- Paid ads: none found. Meta Ad Library has no advertiser records for fish.audio / Hanabi (but that library only tracks products on our list, so no hits doesn't mean no spend).
- SEO (inferred). fish.audio/m/<voice>/ generates an "XX AI Voice Generator" page for each community voice. 2M voices means 2M long-tail landing pages; Probedex shows 45% of traffic is direct.
Copycats / knockoffs
Around the official app's launch, a cluster of name-piggybacking apps appeared on the App Store (iTunes search "fish audio", us, 2026-11-06):
- "Fish Audio: AI Voice Clone tts", Rizwan Rashid, 2026-06-07, 310 US ratings, bundle
com.fishaudio.studio. The same bundle is also selling "celebrity impersonation" on Google Play. It holds chart positions in Russia / Ukraine - "Fish: Text to Speech AI Audio", Victoria Turcan, 2026-07-08,325 ratings
- "Fish Audio: AI Voice Generator", Ahmed Tahir, 2026-07-22; "Fish audio- ai voice clone tts", jahanzaib Hameed, 2026-08-27; "Fish AI: Audio Voice Clone TTS", Arif Ullah Khan; "Fish Labs: AI Text to Speech"; "Fish Audio AI Studio Clone TTS"; kz storefront "Fish Audio - Text to Speech" (id6761884708)
These are classic brand-name knockoffs: before the official app existed they siphoned off brand search traffic, wrapped a generic TTS API, and sold subscriptions.
Why it took off
- The web product already had millions of users. The app just catches them: 8M users, tens of millions of monthly visits, 27k brand searches. The official app had demand waiting on day one (clones fed off it for months). The iOS rank is essentially a web hit moving to phones, not organic App Store growth.
- TikTok editors made it the default tool for voice watermarks and character dubbing: this crowd is teen edit accounts on phones, so it's mobile by nature, and the geography (Brazil, Russian-speaking regions, Vietnam, Italy, Mexico) matches the iOS chart placement exactly.
- The community voice library is supply no one else has: 2M user-uploaded voices, including lots of characters and celebrity voices. Entertainment demand can only be served here, while ElevenLabs and others police this kind of voice tightly. That's also the legal risk (UK actors' union Equity sent a letter 2026-06, and BBC and others reported cloning without consent).
- The model is good enough and cheap: its in-house S2 series has a strong reputation for multilingual output and emotion control, at a fraction of ElevenLabs' price, and developers and reviewers spread it organically.
Differentiation
Versus ElevenLabs: cheaper, better multilingual and accent handling, inline emotion tags, and most importantly an open community voice library (anyone can upload, clone, and share voices). Versus voice-changer and celebrity sound-effect apps: it's a real model that can clone on its own, say any line, and control emotion. Is that why it took off? Yes, and the community voice library is the key factor. Consumer growth (TikTok watermarks, character memes) rests on being able to find any character's voice, which the UGC library provides. Model quality and price explain the developer and enterprise side, the other two-thirds of revenue.
Visibility
Revenue has been public and widely discussed: TechCrunch reported $21M ARR and a $52M seed round; HF0 and arr.club publicly cited $10M and $13M ARR; the founders talked about growth at SF Tech Week; there are already 8+ knockoffs on the App Store. This space is crowded.
What to borrow
- Use an open-source model as the entry point and charge for the hosted version. User-uploaded content (voices) serves as supply, SEO long-tail pages, and training signal at once.
- Target one specific TikTok use case ("voice watermark") and let tutorial creators spread it. Put the tool name right in the video captions.
- The web hit first, then an app to catch mobile users. Flipped around: while a web hit has no official app yet, a clone app built on the brand name and a generic API can pay off (the knockoffs are already doing this, with takedown and complaint risk).
Still unclear
- iOS revenue share and conversion rate are not public. Ranks #30–150 in the utilities paid chart only show some payment in Brazil, Japan, and Russia.
- No evidence found of paid ads on TikTok, Google, or Apple Search Ads (not in the Meta ad library, though that library's coverage is limited).
- Whether copyright and consent issues for celebrity and actor voices (Equity, DMCA) force it to tighten the community library, weakening consumer growth.
- US-store rating growth (about 20 per day) is not high, and it dropped out of the US utilities free top 11-06 200. Whether iOS is still accelerating is unknown.
Sources
- Official blog fish.audio/blog/fish-audio-52m-seed-funding/ (2026-07-27)
- TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/fish-audio-raises-50m-seed-to-buil…
- AlphaSignal alphasignal.ai/news/fish-audio-squeezes-2m-voices-and-voice-… (2026-08-26)
- HF0 LinkedIn ($10M ARR); arr.club ($13M ARR)
- Co-founder LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:751289696514422… (2026-10-05)
- Semrush www.semrush.com/website/fish.audio/overview/ ;AlphaMoat www.alphamoat.ai/en/ai/fish-audio ;Probedex probedex.ai/zh/domain/fish.audio
- Equity www.equity.org.uk/news/2026/equity-demands-fish-audio-remove… (2026-06-03)
- TikTok: TikHub searches for "fish audio", "fish audio watermark", "fish audio voz" (2026-11-06); www.tiktok.com/discover/best-voices-for-watermarks-on-fish-a…
- iTunes lookup / search (2026-11-06); our appstore, googleplay, and metaads databases (2026-10-28 to 11-06)