Company Profile · Speech AI
Speechify
The company that decided reading doesn't require eyes - only ears.
SPEECHIFY, NEW YORK. The unassuming play button that now reads the internet aloud to 50 million people, in a voice of their choosing.
The company that decided reading doesn't require eyes - only ears.
SPEECHIFY, NEW YORK. The unassuming play button that now reads the internet aloud to 50 million people, in a voice of their choosing.
Somewhere this morning, a college student on a crowded train points a phone camera at a page of a physical chemistry textbook. She taps once. The page begins to speak - not in a robot's flat drone, but in a warm, unhurried human voice she picked herself. She closes her eyes and keeps listening, hands free, at 1.6x speed, while the train rattles north.
Multiply that moment by 50 million. That is Speechify on any given day: PDFs, novels, work emails, Google Docs, news articles, and printed pages, all converted into audio and pushed into people's ears. The product is deceptively simple - a play button on top of text. The idea underneath it is not: that access to the written word should never depend on how fast your eyes can decode it.
Speechify is, by its own account and by user count, the largest text-to-speech platform in the world. It lives on iOS and Android, inside Chrome, on the desktop, and increasingly inside other companies' products through a developer API. But it did not begin as a business. It began as a workaround for a kid who couldn't finish his reading.
Cliff Weitzman was diagnosed with dyslexia in the third grade. Reading the way everyone else did was slow, exhausting, and demoralizing. So he found another door in: he listened. He played the audiobook of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone twenty-two times in a row, teaching himself the language and, without quite realizing it, the future of his career.
Years later, the summer before his freshman year at Brown University, Weitzman faced a required reading assignment he knew he'd struggle to finish. Rather than white-knuckle it, he taught himself to code and built a tool that would read the text to him. He was studying Renewable Energy Engineering, not computer science. The reading aid worked. Other people wanted it. In 2017 - the same year Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list - Speechify was formally founded.
His brother Tyler Weitzman joined as co-founder and now leads the company's AI as President and Head of AI. The origin is not incidental marketing; it is the product's operating logic. Every feature answers a question Cliff once had to answer for himself.
Dyslexic since third grade, Brown-educated engineer, and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. Built the first version of Speechify to finish his own reading.
Cliff's brother, leading the AI team behind Speechify's voices, cloning, and speech synthesis.
Speechify started as one app. It's now a small family of them - some for people who want to listen, some for people who want to build.
iOS, Android and desktop. Reads PDFs, books, articles and emails aloud, with scan-and-listen OCR, speed control, and word highlighting.
One click reads any web page, Google Doc or email out loud - the tool that first made Speechify a daily habit for millions.
Voice-over, voice cloning and automated dubbing for businesses and content creators - localize a video without re-recording it.
Drop Speechify's AI voices and multilingual synthesis into your own product. The invisible voice behind other apps.
Launched on iOS. Adds AI web search, podcast creation, and the first steps toward "agentic" voice workflows that act, not just read.
Have Snoop Dogg or Gwyneth Paltrow narrate your homework. A delightful feature that happens to be genuinely useful.
Speechify's core audience is anyone for whom reading with the eyes is hard, slow, or impossible: people with dyslexia, ADHD, and low vision, and anyone who simply learns best by listening. Research cited by the company found that dyslexic students using Speechify showed better reading comprehension than those relying on traditional methods alone.
But accessibility built well tends to help everyone. The commuter, the multitasking parent, the professional plowing through a 40-page report before a meeting - they all reach for the same play button. That's the quiet genius of the thing: a tool designed for a specific need became a mainstream productivity habit.
In June 2025, Apple made the point official, handing Speechify its Design Award for Inclusivity at WWDC - praising its clean interface and deep support for VoiceOver and Dynamic Type.
Cliff Weitzman, a dyslexic Brown student, teaches himself to code and builds a tool to read his summer reading assignment aloud.
The reading aid becomes a company, backed by a seed round from G9 Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, and Adjacent VC. Weitzman lands on Forbes 30 Under 30.
A second seed round fuels growth as the Chrome extension and mobile apps turn Speechify into a daily tool for millions.
Speechify wins the 2025 Apple Design Award for Inclusivity at WWDC - external validation of its accessibility-first design.
The Voice AI Assistant launches on iOS, adding web search, podcast creation, and the first "agentic voice workflows."
Speechify's growth story is unusual for the AI era: it scaled to tens of millions of users without a giant venture war chest. Public records point to seed-stage funding rather than the mega-rounds that define much of today's AI landscape - the fuel was product-market fit, not capital. Third-party estimates put annual revenue around $17.6 million in 2025.
The model is classic freemium SaaS with three doors: a free consumer tier that upsells premium and celebrity voices and offline audio (B2C/D2C); a creator studio for voice-over, cloning and dubbing; and usage-based API pricing for developers and enterprises. The team numbers roughly 180-200, with a substantial engineering presence spanning New York and Kyiv.
Cliff listened to the first Harry Potter audiobook 22 times in a row to teach himself to read.
The whole company started as a way to finish a single summer reading assignment.
Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow are both selectable voices for reading your documents.
Cliff studied Renewable Energy Engineering - not CS - and taught himself to code to build it.
It's a family business: brother Tyler co-founded it and runs the AI team.
Point your camera at a printed page and OCR reads the physical book aloud.
The student steps off at her stop, textbook still unopened in her bag, the chapter already finished - heard, not read. A decade ago that page would have been a wall. A boy who listened to Harry Potter twenty-two times built the door through it, then handed the key to 50 million people.
Speechify's ambition keeps widening - from a reading aid, to a browser button, to a voice studio, to an assistant that can search, summarize, and soon act on your behalf. But the core promise hasn't moved since that summer at Brown: whatever you need to read, you should be able to simply listen. Press play, and keep walking.