Hume AI, the leading voice AI research company focused on aligning artificial intelligence with human well-being, announced the appointment of a new Chief Executive Officer and an expansion of Hume’s research partnerships.
Andrew Ettinger joins Hume AI to accelerate the company’s momentum in research services. He brings 15 years of leadership in data and AI infrastructure, building and scaling teams responsible for over $2 billion in ARR at Pivotal, Astronomer, and Appen. Most recently, he served as Chief Revenue Officer at Appen, where he led the commercial operations supplying hyperscalers and AI labs with proprietary datasets and LLM evaluation software.
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“Voice in AI is evolving from a feature to the primary interface for the next generation of applications and devices,” said Ettinger. “Understanding emotion will be essential to unlocking AI’s full potential and that will require ongoing systems that incorporate human-in-the-loop feedback. That’s where Hume’s data, annotation, and reinforcement-learning infrastructure is setting the pace for the industry.”
Additionally, Hume agreed to non-exclusively license certain technologies to Google, and co-founder Alan Cowen has joined Google.
“Hume’s infrastructure—built around emotionally grounded data, evaluation, and reinforcement learning—is exactly what frontier labs and enterprises need as voice becomes the primary interface for AI,” said Cowen. “Having spent time getting to know Andrew, I’m confident that he is the right leader to take Hume to the next level as the leading research infrastructure provider for voice and emotion.”
Ettinger’s appointment as CEO reflects a major milestone in Hume’s evolution into a core research infrastructure partner for leading AI labs. In recent months, Hume has been rolling out its research platform to an increasing number of partners —including its voice evaluation stack, data pipelines, and reinforcement-learning “voice gym” that trains models to be more realistic and emphatic. Hume also continues to train cutting-edge voice AI models and plans to release the next generation of its text-to-speech and speech-to-speech models in the coming weeks.
Ettinger continued, “Separate from the agreement with Google, Hume is on track to generate more than $100M in revenue this year from research partnerships with frontier AI labs and AI-first enterprises, driven by accelerating demand for its voice data and annotations, post-training workflows, evaluation systems, and reinforcement-learning infrastructure.”
“What has always distinguished Hume is the strength of its AI research foundation in voice, paired with the capabilities to build and deploy speech language models at scale,” said John Beadle, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Aegis Ventures, and lead investor of Hume AI. “As the company has matured, it has become clear that the same infrastructure built to power our own frontier models can serve a much broader set of customers across the industry building cutting-edge voice models, particularly major AI research labs. Andrew has a rare track record of translating research-grade capabilities into durable, category-defining businesses, which makes him uniquely positioned to lead Hume’s next chapter.”