AI voice company WellSaid retools for agents while keeping its commitment to human actors

WellSaid, the AI voice company that spun out of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2019, is reinventing itself for the era of AI agents.

The company this week launched WellSaid Producer, which connects its voiceover direction tools directly to AI assistants such as Claude and Microsoft Copilot.

Instead of logging into WellSaid’s app, corporate users can ask the AI assistant for a voiceover to accompany a training or marketing video, for example. The assistant then sends the script to WellSaid, which generates the audio using its licensed voices.

It’s part of a broader overhaul and refocusing of WellSaid’s business. The company has spent the past two years moving away from individual users to focus on businesses. It now has about 30 employees, down from more than 70 in late 2024.

Along the way, WellSaid has turned profitable, CEO Benjamin Dorr told GeekWire.

“We’ve been calling this adventure Act II, so I guess Producer is Scene I,” Dorr said. Extending the metaphor, he acknowledged that “the cast is a lot smaller,” and noted that many of the company’s leaders are new, recruited from his own network.

Dorr joined WellSaid as CFO in 2024 and became CEO in spring 2025. He was previously chief operating officer of Cordial, a San Diego marketing software company, and earlier worked in tech investing and banking at The Carlyle Group, Morgan Stanley and Citi.

He succeeded Brian Cook, the former Nintex CEO who led WellSaid for about 16 months. Co-founder Matt Hocking, who was CEO until early 2024, remains on WellSaid’s board and is now chief product officer at Type, an AI startup for creative writers.

Dorr’s leadership team includes three executives who also worked at Cordial and joined WellSaid since last fall: Natalia Holts, senior vice president of finance and accounting; Jeni Bishop, vice president of marketing; and Bryan Keefer, vice president of product.

Chris Johnson, the chief product and technology officer, and co-founder Mixail Petrochuk, the chief technology officer, remain from the earlier leadership team.

The company is maintaining its longstanding practice of building its AI voices from recordings of professional voice actors, who are paid royalties when businesses use their voices to narrate training courses, marketing and other videos.

WellSaid drew widespread attention in 2023 when it created a spot-on synthetic version of former NPR “Planet Money” host Robert Smith’s voice, with his permission, as part of a special series by the popular radio show and podcast.

Its customers include nearly half of the Fortune 100, according to WellSaid. The company’s licensing approach stands out in a sector that remains a wild west, with models trained on audio scraped from the internet and tools used to fake the voices of public figures.

How it works: Producer uses Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a standard way for AI assistants to connect to other software. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Atlassian’s Rovo, and Dorr said AI agents that work on their own will be able to use it by the end of the year.

Companies using WellSaid Producer can set up style guides so brand names, acronyms and technical terms are pronounced the same way in every file. When a product name or script changes, Producer can update every affected voiceover in one pass, and each finished file carries a record of its license.

WellSaid also says it’s the first voiceover platform to generate audio natively at 48 kHz, the standard for film and video. WellSaid will continue to offer its Studio app for customers who want to work there directly.

Producer is sold as a platform, with customers committing to buy credits for minutes of finished, licensed audio. WellSaid’s licenses today are mostly one-time buyouts, but Dorr said the company wants to price more like the traditional voiceover industry, where an ad voiceover is priced by its length, reach and how long it runs.

The strategy: Dorr said voiceover is just one step in a larger production process, and many creative tools now include basic AI speech that is sometimes good enough. He sees AI agents letting companies combine specialized tools from vendors they trust, instead of settling for one all-in-one app.

“We view MCP, and agents in general, to be as disruptive to software as the Web once was twenty years ago,” he said.

Voice actors: Actors’ revenue share rates won’t change when their voices are used through AI assistants, Dorr said. One of his first moves as CEO was to open the company’s stock option pool to its top 20 voice actors, and WellSaid is building a voice actor advisory board, with more details expected to be released in December. Dorr said WellSaid plans to add custom royalty structures, “potentially all the way up to union rate cards.”

Customers will also be able to use voice models from other companies alongside WellSaid’s own, for features its models lack, such as one voice speaking several languages. The voices still come from WellSaid’s actors under its licensing terms. “We’re not moving from our position on commercial licensing,” Dorr said.

The business: WellSaid has about 1,000 business customers, and its top 25 customers each spend more than $100,000 a year, Dorr said. Moving away from individual users “did flatten our growth compared to a lot of AI companies growing at astronomical rates,” he said.

By comparison, rival ElevenLabs, which has offered voice generation through Claude since 2025, was valued at $22 billion in a recent employee tender offer.

WellSaid raised venture debt from Multiplier Capital in March but didn’t disclose the amount. Its most recent disclosed equity funding was a $10 million Series A round in 2021 that valued the company at $65 million, according to PitchBook.

Dorr said debt was a better fit than equity for a “modestly growing and, now, profitable company,” at a time when investors’ growth expectations “have become extreme.” He said WellSaid will consider other financing in 2027 “if our ambitions outstrip our ability to reinvest.”