South Korea-based startup Podonos, which develops solutions for evaluating voice AI models, has secured an additional pre-seed investment from NAVER D2SF.

Earlier in March, Podonos raised approximately USD 750K(around KRW 1 billion) in its first institutional funding round, led by Serac Ventures in the United States with participation from KAIST Venture Investment Holdings.

As the number of AI models grows explosively, the importance of performance evaluation and validation has been increasing. Voice AI, the segment where Podonos is focusing, is rapidly expanding across speech recognition, speech synthesis, customer engagement, and the content industry, while also gaining significant value as an AI agent interface. Unlike simple pronunciation accuracy, evaluation factors such as intonation, emotional expression, persona, user preference, and noise handling are diverse, driving strong demand for identifying models suitable for specific use cases.

Podonos leverages a global workforce of 150,000 evaluators and its proprietary AI-powered automation platform to deliver customized voice AI evaluation results within 12 hours. Its customers include both AI model developers and AI-powered service providers across the AI value chain. For developers, Podonos serves as a tool for performance validation and improvement, while service providers use it for model selection and monitoring optimized to their target needs.

The company has already earned recognition for its value and quality from global AI startups such as Resemble AI, Play AI, and Sanas AI, and its evaluation results are frequently cited in tech-focused communities and media outlets, rapidly building credibility in the global tech scene. Looking ahead, Podonos plans to expand its client base across sectors with strong demand for voice AI—including healthcare, finance, gaming, and advertising—while broadening its evaluation capabilities to multimodal AI models.

Yang Sang-hwan, Head of NAVER D2SF, commented, “As the flood of AI models continues, the importance of AI for AI—solutions that enable effective AI utilization—is growing. Podonos is a rare team capable of quantitatively evaluating and validating voice AI performance. Alongside the growth of voice AI, we expect Podonos to strengthen its global presence and generate significant collaboration synergies with NAVER.”

Soo-hyun Bae, CEO of Podonos, added, “We will use the newly secured funding to expand our development team and enhance automated AI model analysis. Through the investment from NAVER D2SF, we look forward to collaborating on high-quality voice services and growing together.”