Podonos, a company focused on improving how voice AI systems are tested and validated, has secured $2.4 million in pre-seed funding. The funding round was led by Serac Ventures, with participation from Naver D2SF and KAIST Ventures.
Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Los Gatos, Podonos is tackling a critical but often overlooked part of AI development: evaluation. While much of the industry’s attention is on building larger and more powerful models, measuring how those models perform in real-world conditions is still a slow, inconsistent, and resource-heavy process. Podonos’ human-in-the-loop platform is designed to change that by delivering comprehensive evaluations in under 12 hours, even when processing thousands of audio samples in multiple languages.
The platform evaluates voice AI models across key dimensions, including naturalness, similarity, emotional accuracy, and speech recognition performance. This approach enables AI teams to identify weaknesses quickly, iterate on improvements, and validate results before products reach the market. By combining human feedback with scalable infrastructure, Podonos aims to provide a “trust layer” for voice AI—ensuring that models are not only robust but also reliable, fair, and ready for deployment.
The need for such evaluation tools is skyrocketing as voice AI expands into sectors like finance, healthcare, legal services, automotive systems, and gaming. In these industries, accuracy and trust are essential, and undetected flaws can have serious consequences. Podonos’ technology is designed to uncover potential issues early, giving companies the confidence to launch products that meet both performance and safety standards.
With this funding, Podonos is positioning itself as a go-to partner for AI product teams that want to move quickly without sacrificing quality. And by streamlining the evaluation process and making it more transparent, the company hopes to accelerate the adoption of voice AI in high-stakes, real-world applications.
How the funding will be used: The company plans to use the investment to expand its engineering team, enhance its post-analysis tools, and launch in major markets, including the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
KEY QUOTES:
“Everyone’s focused on training bigger models, but rarely talks about how to measure what works in the real world. 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.”
Dr. Soohyun Bae, founder and CEO of Podonos
“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.”
Kevin Moore, a partner at Serac Ventures
