Analytics India Magazine · May 2026
Profile of KittenTTS and Stellon Labs covering the open-weight voice model, on-device deployment, developer adoption, and the lab’s next roadmap.
Building tiny frontier AI models that run on edge devices
Company research
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Updated Jul 29, 2026
Overview
Stellon Labs is a YC S25 AI research lab building tiny frontier models for edge and embedded devices. Its flagship product is KittenTTS, an ultra-lightweight open-source text-to-speech model family.
Primary product
KittenTTS — a sub-25MB on-device text-to-speech model family
Founded
2025
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Team size
1-10
Work style
Flexible
Industry
Technology, Information and Internet
Sub-industry
AI research lab / edge AI / on-device speech models
Offices
San Francisco, California, United States
Sacramento, California, United States
Business model
B2B
open-source
enterprise licensing
custom model training
integration/support services
Funding
Stage
Seed
Total raised
$500K
Latest round
Seed · Sep 2025
Latest amount
$500K
Sep 2025 · Y Combinator / Paul Graham
Jan 2025 · Y Combinator
People & investors
Work & culture
Research-driven, open-source, fast-shipping, and edge-first; the team emphasizes efficiency, quantization, and on-device inference.
Work style
Flexible
Product & market
Pricing
Open-source model distribution plus paid custom model training, deployment support, and enterprise licensing
Differentiators
- —Sub-25MB CPU-only TTS models
- —On-device inference without GPUs
- —Open-source Apache 2.0 release
- —Edge-first speech/language/video focus
- —Privacy-preserving local execution
- —Custom training and deployment support
Technology
Python
ONNX
PyTorch
C++
Swift
Kotlin
Java
TensorFlow Lite
Core ML
Hugging Face
GitHub Actions
Linux
Competitors
Deeplite
Genuix
OneBit AI
Piper
Kokoro
Bark
Coqui XTTS
Scale & contact
Estimated revenue
≈$220K ARR (estimated)
Latest news
The Agentic Digest · Mar 2026
Newsletter-style coverage of the KittenTTS release and its implications for offline, local, and embedded voice applications.
LinkedIn · Feb 2026
Rohan Joshi announced KittenTTS V0.8, including three open-source expressive models, 8 voices, and CPU-only local inference.
Fondo · Feb 2026
Launch write-up describing Stellon Labs as a tiny-model edge AI lab, highlighting KittenTTS, local inference, and the company’s interest in developers and hardware/software partners.
LinkedIn · Aug 2025
Company post announcing YC S25 backing, the founding team, KittenTTS traction, and the company’s edge-device focus.
Jobs and careers at Stellon Labs
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