Phonic Releases Phonic 1, a Speech to Speech Model for Voice Agents, and Raises a 27.5 Million Dollar Series A
Introducing Phonic-1, the most advanced speech-to-speech model for agentic tasks — from @phonic_co, the speech-to-speech model company. We’ve had a breakout year and raised a $27.5M Series A led by @firstround with participation from @Lux_Capital, @felicis, and Definition.
Context
Phonic says its model can call tools while a caller is still talking, which could make AI phone agents feel much less robotic than systems that pause to look things up.
Most voice agents chain three models: one transcribes speech, one writes a reply and one speaks it. Speech to speech models handle audio directly, which keeps tone and timing. Phonic is a San Francisco startup focused only on such models. Moin Nadeem is a cofounder.
Deep dive
Moin Nadeem announced on Thursday that Phonic is introducing Phonic 1, which he called the most advanced speech to speech model for agentic tasks, along with a 27.5 million dollar Series A led by First Round with Lux Capital, Felicis and Definition.
Phonic's blog says the model took the top spot on the Artificial Analysis Speech to Speech Index and claims the highest task success at the lowest latency. It says Phonic 1 is the only model that can take actions while the caller is still talking, so answers are ready when they stop. The company claims under 600 millisecond responses, more than 50 languages with switching mid call, and a score of 83.2 on Sierra's multilingual voice benchmark versus 79.9 for GPT Live 1.
The results table in the post compares Phonic 1 with GPT Live 1, Grok Voice 3 and Gemini 3.8 Live. These are mostly figures selected by Phonic, though some come from Artificial Analysis. Phonic also notes that humans still beat it on naturalness about 60 percent of the time in blind tests.
The company says total funding is now 31.5 million dollars and pricing starts at 7 cents per minute.
What to expect next
Watch for independent tests of the claim that it can act mid sentence, and for whether large customer service platforms adopt it. The big labs all ship live voice models, so a small startup will need to keep its lead on latency and reliability. Progress on naturalness, which Phonic names as its main research goal, will decide whether callers notice the difference.