Voice AI for startups.Your first year is on us.

Accepted startups receive 12 months on Scale, with 8 million shared Sonic and Ink credits each month, plus $299 per month in Managed Agents credits. Model credits roll over up to 2× your monthly allowance.

Participants share their logo and give Cartesia the right to use their name and logo across marketing materials. Participants also agree to post about the grant on their social media accounts if Cartesia requests it.

Startups at any stage are eligible. We also consider students and one-off projects on a case-by-case basis.

Apply for the Startups Grant with information about your team and what you are building. We review applications on a rolling basis and aim to respond within a week. Accepted teams receive a coupon code to apply the credits to their account.

Enable pay-as-you-go overage to continue after your included model credits run out. Sonic and Ink draw from the shared model allowance. See pricing for usage rates, or contact support@cartesia.ai to discuss higher-volume plans.

When your grant period ends, your account moves to $299 per month to stay on the Scale plan. If your product is taking off, our team is happy to talk through a tailored enterprise plan. If things aren't going as planned, you can cancel or switch to a lower volume plan anytime.

The grant covers Sonic text to speech, Ink speech to text, and Managed Agents. Use Sonic to turn written responses into speech, Ink to transcribe audio, or Managed Agents to build conversations around your instructions and tools. Sonic and Ink share a model-credit allowance; Managed Agents has a separate monthly credit allowance.

Yes. Sonic converts text into speech through an API, so you can add spoken responses to an application you already have. Your application supplies the text and plays the returned audio. Start with the Cartesia documentation and test short scripts from your own product before expanding to more workflows.

Yes. Managed Agents lets you build a voice agent with your own instructions, tools, and voice. For customer support, connect the information the agent needs to answer questions and define which actions it can take. Test how it handles unclear requests and when it should hand off to your team. Explore customer service workflows for examples.

Yes. Sonic supports speech generation in multiple languages. Browse the language examples, choose a voice, and test scripts that reflect your audience. Review pronunciation, names, numbers, and regional terms with a fluent speaker before launch. Language coverage differs by product, so check the documentation for the speech generation or transcription model you plan to use.

Start with a representative workflow and measure how much speech you generate, how much audio you transcribe, and how much agent usage it requires. Use those measurements with the current pricing to estimate monthly usage. The grant provides credits rather than a fixed number of calls, so the number of conversations you can support depends on their length and the products you use.

The customer stories describe how teams build with Cartesia. Read about Bolna for voice calling, Speko for voice AI evaluation, and ActOnCue for an interactive scene reader. Use these examples to identify a workflow to test in your own product.