SPEECHIFY

Cliff Weitzman grew up dyslexic. Reading was slow and exhausting for him.

At Brown University, where he studied a mix of engineering and computer science, he started building tools to read his textbooks aloud so he could keep up with his classmates. That hack turned into a mission.

In 2017 he launched Speechify to do one thing well. Take any text and read it out loud in a voice that does not sound like a robot.

He later brought in his brother Tyler to lead the AI. The same year, Cliff landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Speechify takes anything written, an article, a PDF, an email, a textbook, and reads it aloud in a natural voice. The basic app is free.

You pay a subscription to unlock the best voices, faster reading speeds, and the good features. On top of that, Speechify sells to businesses.

Companies and creators use it for voiceovers, dubbing, and voice cloning, and developers plug into its text-to-speech API. So there are two engines.

Consumers who want to listen instead of read, and businesses that need AI voices at scale.

The core product is the Speechify app, available as a Chrome extension and on iPhone and Android. It reads articles, documents, and books aloud in natural voices.

Speechify Studio is the business side, a tool for making voiceovers, dubbing videos, and cloning voices. There is also a text-to-speech API for developers who want AI voices inside their own apps.

The pitch across all of them is the same. Turn reading into listening.

Speechify grew off the back of one channel above all others. Ads.

A lot of them. The company reportedly runs more than 1,000 ads a day, blanketing YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts with demos of the app reading text aloud.

It also nailed a specific audience early. Students, people with dyslexia, and busy professionals who wanted to get through their reading on a commute.

The Chrome extension alone passed 20 million users. Loud, relentless marketing plus a genuinely useful free product did the work.

The AI voice market got crowded fast. ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and a wave of startups all now make voices that sound human.

Speechify no longer has that technology to itself. Its edge has to come from distribution and brand, not a secret model.

There is also the cost problem. Running high-quality AI voices for 20 million people is expensive, and the company spends heavily on ads to keep growing.

In 2025 it did about $17.6 million in revenue with a team of roughly 160. Solid, but it has to prove it can stay ahead in a race everyone is now running.

Speechify raised $10 million at a $100 million valuation, announced in early 2024. The round pulled in eight investors.

For a company founded all the way back in 2017, that is a fairly lean amount of outside money, which tells you something. Speechify grew mostly on revenue and aggressive marketing, not on venture cash.

The $100 million valuation finally put a real number on what began as one dyslexic student's workaround.