companies

Coqui AI

Coqui AI built open-source text-to-speech and voice-cloning models (Coqui TTS/XTTS); the company shut down its commercial services in December 2023.

Coqui AI was a Berlin-based speech AI startup founded in 2021 by Eren Golge, Josh Meyer, Kelly Davis, and Reuben Morais, all former Mozilla employees who had worked on Mozilla's open-source speech projects. The company built open-source text-to-speech and voice-cloning models, including the widely used Coqui TTS library and the multilingual XTTS-v2 voice-cloning model. Coqui raised a $3.3 million seed round in March 2023 from investors including ScaleX Ventures and Mango Capital. Despite strong technical traction and a large open-source community, the company struggled to convert its open-source offering into a profitable commercial business amid intensifying competition from OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs. In December 2023, Coqui announced it was shutting down its paid hosted services, with servers taken offline that month. Its open-source code and pretrained models, including XTTS-v2, remain publicly available on GitHub and Hugging Face and continue to be used by the community.

Founded

2021

Headquarters

Berlin, Germany

Sector

lab