Hume AI, the leading voice AI research company dedicated to aligning artificial intelligence with human well-being, recently announced a new CEO. The new boss, Andrew Ettinger, who has 15 years of leadership in data and AI infrastructure, building and scaling teams responsible for over USD 2 billion in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) at companies like Pivotal, Astronomer, and Appen, will now accelerate the tech company’s momentum in research services.
Andrew Ettinger recently served as Chief Revenue Officer at Appen, where he led commercial operations supplying hyperscalers and AI labs with proprietary datasets and LLM evaluation software. Appen is a leading AI data collection company that delivers high-quality, custom data across all languages and modalities (text, image, audio, and video) to create tailored datasets for training diverse AI models.
New York-based data company Astronomer specialises in DataOps and AI orchestration. The company’s flagship platform, Astro, allows businesses to build, manage, and scale complex data pipelines and AI workflows.
Reacting to the news of his hiring, Ettinger said, “Voice in AI is evolving from a feature to the primary interface for the next generation of applications and devices. 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 AI’s data, annotation, and reinforcement-learning infrastructure is setting the pace for the industry.”
Hume AI recently agreed to license certain technologies non-exclusively to Google. Additionally, co-founder Alan Cowen has joined the company led by Sundar Pichai.
Tough Test Awaits Andrew Ettinger
Andrew Ettinger has a rich portfolio of guiding data and AI infrastructure-related companies, and his background is rooted in scaling enterprises. He studied Business Marketing at The Ohio State University. Rather than focusing on engineering or academia, Ettinger has leaned into growth, revenue, and, most importantly, figuring out how to take emerging technologies and turn them into sustainable businesses.
Over the years, Andrew Ettinger has developed a reputation for helping startups move from early traction to serious revenue scale. A significant part of that was developing go-to-market strategies, building sales teams, establishing customer success structures, forging partnerships, and addressing the operational side that often determines whether a tech company can sustain its momentum beyond its early stages.
One of Andrew Ettinger’s more visible roles was at Pivotal Software, where he was involved during a high-growth phase. The company expanded rapidly, and Ettinger played a part in scaling revenue significantly before its IPO. Later, at Astronomer, he worked in global sales leadership, helping expand enterprise adoption of data and open-source tools. The roles at Pivotal Software and Astronomer helped Ettinger master the art of commercialising complex technical products for large customers.
As already mentioned, Andrew Ettinger served as Chief Revenue Officer at Appen before becoming CEO at Hume AI. Appen provides data and evaluation services used to train and improve machine learning systems. That role put him right in the middle of the AI infrastructure world, working with major labs and technology companies, and gave Hume AI’s new CEO direct exposure to how modern AI products are built and deployed.
Hume AI, in the coming months, will be eyeing a fresh restart, as its previous CEO, Alan Cowen, along with several of the top engineers, got snapped up by Google in January 2026 in another incident of talent poaching, where promising individuals from small AI startups are being “inducted” into the fold of global tech titans. Cowen and his former Hume AI colleagues will now work with DeepMind to improve Gemini’s voice features, as per WIRED.
While Hume AI will continue to supply its technology to other AI firms, Andrew Ettinger, who joined the company a couple of weeks back before being promoted as the CEO, told TechCrunch that Google has a “non-exclusive right to certain technologies, and we’ll be infusing that into their processes.”
According to reports, his immediate priority will be to release new models in the coming months and set up Hume AI to bring in USD 100 million in revenue this year.
Hume AI, to some extent, has become a victim of the new trend called “acqui-hire,” where tech biggies poach top AI talent (including startups’ teams) to stay ahead of the innovation curve, while skirting regulatory scrutiny by acquiring a startup’s talented individuals rather than the company outright.
In 2025, Google followed the same template by acquiring viral AI coding startup Windsurf’s CEO and other top researchers. OpenAI, which itself started as a non-profit research lab in 2015, has been a prominent practitioner of acqui-hire, bringing in several startup teams in recent months, including Convogo and Roi.
Hume AI, which dubs its model as the “World’s Most Realistic and Expressive Voice AI,” has customised the tool to understand a user’s emotions and mood based on their voice. In 2024, the startup launched its “Empathetic Voice Interface,” a conversational AI with emotional intelligence.
The company has raised funding close to USD 80 million to date, according to PitchBook. It only made sense for Google, which has been steadily improving its Gemini Live feature, which allows a user to have conversations with the chatbot, to go after Alan Cowen and his colleagues to refine the tech giant’s product further and beat the industry competition.