Toby Kim is Co-Founder of Nari Labs, a South Korea-based open-source AI startup building cutting-edge text-to-speech technology that rivals the world's leading proprietary voice models.

As an undergraduate student, Toby previously contributed to Weavel (YC S24), a product analytics platform for conversational AI, before channeling his passion for audio AI into Nari Labs.

Toby and his co-founder built their flagship model, Dia, with zero external funding, leveraging Google's TPU Research Cloud program and Hugging Face's ZeroGPU grant to train a 1.6B parameter model in just three months.

Dia achieved rapid open-source traction, reaching thousands of GitHub stars and trending as the number 2 model on Hugging Face within 24 hours of launch, with Nari Labs planning a consumer app for social content creation built on top of the model.

Nari Labs' Dia model outperforms proprietary offerings from ElevenLabs Studio and Sesame CSM-1B in expressiveness, nonverbal cues, and emotional dialogue, demonstrating that world-class AI can be built without venture capital or large research teams.