Organization
Cartesia
Cartesia is an AI model developer and developer platform company headquartered in San Francisco, California1. No open models or tools from Cartesia are in this catalog yet; its documented products are listed below.
Documented roles: Model developer · Developer platform
Cartesia develops speech models and offers them through an API, including the Sonic text-to-speech and Ink speech-to-text models, along with a platform for building and hosting voice agents. Its research centers on state space model (SSM) architectures, and it publishes some SSM language models on Hugging Face.321213
Using this organization’s offerings
The detailed audience, self-hosting, pricing, and restrictions review has not yet been completed. Consult the sourced product records below and the publisher’s current terms. Missing detail means unknown, not unavailable.
Key facts
- Ownership (separate from openness)
- Privately held
Recorded classification; fact-level ownership verification pending.
- Legal form
- Unknown
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California1
- Founded
- Unknown
- Sectors
- Agents, Open models
What is and isn’t public
Cartesia's Sonic and Ink speech models are offered as hosted services through its API; the pages reviewed do not describe public weights for them. Cartesia publishes Apache 2.0 client SDKs, the Line voice-agent SDK, and the Edge library, and has posted Llamba language-model weights on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. Llamba is distilled from Meta's Llama-3.x models.381191314
Products
Hosted model products
Labeled Hosted product/API — this describes how a documented product is delivered (hosted access). It does not determine whether underlying weights or code are open; assess the specific release and its licenses.
| Product | Kind | Documented delivery and access | Reviewed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sonic (external site: docs.cartesia.ai) | Hosted model API | Text-to-speech model family available through the Cartesia API and browser Playground; the current documented model ID is sonic-3.6. Cartesia lists a Free plan with monthly credits, paid Pro, Startup, and Scale plans, and custom Enterprise pricing.46 | Oct 1, 2026 |
| Ink (external site: docs.cartesia.ai) | Hosted model API | Streaming speech-to-text model (Ink 2) with turn detection, available through the same Cartesia API and API keys as Sonic.3 | Oct 1, 2026 |
Other products
| Product | Kind | Documented delivery and access | Reviewed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line (external site: docs.cartesia.ai) | Developer tool | Voice-agent platform that runs agent code in Cartesia's managed runtime with Ink and Sonic by default; its Python SDK is published on GitHub under Apache 2.0.578 | Oct 1, 2026 |
Cataloged artifacts
No artifact records in this catalog list Cartesia. That is not evidence that none exist — only that none have been reviewed here.
Notable documented facts
- Cartesia's Edge repository, licensed under Apache 2.0, provides SSM language models for on-device use, including Rene and the Llamba family, with PyTorch, Apple silicon (Metal), and MLX packages.1011
- The Llamba paper describes the models as distillations of Llama-3.x into the Mamba architecture. The Llamba-8B model card on Hugging Face gives an Apache 2.0 license.1413
In the news
Cartesia releases Sonic-3.6 text-to-speech with Odia, Urdu, and Hindi-English code-switching
On August 27, 2026 Cartesia announced Sonic-3.6, a text-to-speech model that it says arrived two months after Sonic-3.5 and is generally available in its playground and through its API. The announcement says Odia and Urdu are added as new languages. It also describes Hinglish support for switching between Hindi and English in a single generation, better accent retention for instant voice clones, and an optional locale field that controls how dates, times, and numbers are read. The post does not describe a release of model weights. USASI has not tested Sonic-3.6.
Cartesia releases Ink-2, a speech-to-text model for real-time voice agents
On July 9, 2026 Cartesia released Ink-2, a speech-to-text model built for real-time voice agents. The announcement says Ink-2 has built-in semantic endpointing that uses meaning rather than silence to decide when a speaker's turn is over, and that it natively emits turn.start, turn.eager_end, and turn.end events without an external voice activity detector. Cartesia also says it worked on recognizing structured entities such as phone numbers, email addresses, and dates. Ink-2 is available through Cartesia's playground and API and through LiveKit, Vapi, and Pipecat; the post does not describe a release of model weights. USASI has not tested Ink-2.
Open positions
28 recently confirmed positions in this catalog.
Last successful source check: Oct 15, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC
What this catalog does not know
- Founding date: not documented in the sources reviewed.
- Open artifacts: none from this organization are in the catalog yet.
Have a primary source? How to report a correction.
U.S. eligibility
Eligible · basis: U.S. headquarters
Cartesia's terms of service identify Cartesia AI, Inc. as the operator of its services, give a postal address in San Francisco, California, and apply California law. No non-U.S. parent or headquarters is documented on the pages reviewed.1
Sources
This listing is not an endorsement or a federal approval.
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APA style
USASI. (2026, October 1). Cartesia. United States of America Superintelligence. https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/companies/cartesia/
BibTeX
@misc{usasi_cartesia,
author = {{USASI}},
title = {Cartesia},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
howpublished = {\url{https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/companies/cartesia/}},
note = {United States of America Superintelligence. Last updated 2026-10-01}
}The date is when this page was last updated. Add the date you read it if your style needs one.
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