Karan Goel

“This is first and foremost a real-time intelligence company,” Karan Goel said in 2025. “That means building the fastest, smartest models that never shut off.” He is co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, a San Francisco, California voice AI company whose Sonic text-to-speech and Ink speech-to-text models run inside real-time voice agents.

A Family Business in New Delhi

Goel grew up in New Delhi, surrounded by relatives who ran the family's 125-year-old scientific equipment manufacturing business. He got excited about AI in college but felt far from the action. “I was in India, while all this amazing stuff was happening in American universities,” he said. “There was so much interesting work happening and I wanted to be part of it.”

From Stanford Research to a Company

He earned a master's degree at Carnegie Mellon and a PhD at Stanford, where he met Albert Gu, Arjun Desai, Brandon Yang, and Chris Ré. Their research on state space models became the basis for Cartesia, which they spun out of the lab in 2023. “Between when I joined my PhD program and left, the world was completely different,” Goel said, as academia lost ground in building frontier systems.

A Direct Line From Customers to Research

Goel set Cartesia up so that customers can reach its research, engineering, and sales teams directly. “When there’s feedback that’s particularly relevant to how the model performs or operates, there has to be a direct line of communication,” he said. That feedback shaped Ink, a speech-to-text family rebuilt from OpenAI's Whisper for noisy, real-time phone calls.