ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs Inc. is an artificial intelligence company founded in 2022 by childhood friends Piotr Dąbkowski, a former Google machine learning engineer, and Mati Staniszewski, ex-Palantir strategist, specializing in advanced speech synthesis, voice cloning, and text-to-speech technologies that produce highly realistic audio outputs.[1][2] The company, headquartered in New York City, develops APIs and platforms supporting over 70 languages for applications including dubbing, virtual agents, audiobooks, and enterprise audio scaling, with its eleven_v3 model noted for achieving breakthrough expressiveness in human-like speech generation.[3][4] ElevenLabs has experienced rapid growth, securing $180 million in Series C funding in January 2025 at a $3.3 billion valuation, driven by demand for its low-latency, multilingual voice tools that enable developers and creators to integrate AI audio responsibly.[5] Its innovations stem from the founders' early frustrations with poor dubbing quality in Polish media, leading to products like the Voice Changer API and Agents Platform, which prioritize natural interaction as voice interfaces proliferate.[6][4] Despite these advancements, ElevenLabs has encountered controversies, including a 2025 lawsuit from voice actors alleging unauthorized use of their recordings for AI training, which was settled as the first resolution in AI copyright litigation involving voice likenesses.[7] The platform's voice cloning capabilities have also facilitated misuse, such as deepfake audio in a 2024 robocall impersonating President Biden, prompting ElevenLabs to ban offending accounts and implement safeguards like watermarking and abuse detection updates.[8][9] These issues highlight ongoing ethical challenges in deploying generative audio AI, balanced against the company's emphasis on compliance and responsible deployment.[10]History
Founding and Initial Development
ElevenLabs was co-founded in early 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, two Polish childhood friends who first met as teenagers at Copernicus High School in Warsaw.[1][11] Staniszewski, who serves as CEO, previously worked as a deployment strategist at Palantir, while Dąbkowski, the CTO, had experience as a machine learning engineer at Google.[12] Their decision to start the company stemmed from frustrations with existing synthetic voice technologies, particularly in areas like movie dubbing and audio narration, where they sought to create more natural and expressive AI-generated speech.[13][14] The company initially operated as a research-focused entity, prioritizing the development of advanced text-to-speech (TTS) and voice cloning models built from first principles to overcome limitations in prior systems, such as unnatural intonation and limited multilingual support.[11] Throughout 2022, the founders assembled a small team and invested in training proprietary audio AI models, leveraging recent advances in deep learning to generate voices that captured human-like nuances in emotion, accent, and prosody.[15] This period emphasized rapid iteration on core algorithms rather than immediate commercialization, with early efforts targeting high-fidelity voice synthesis for applications in content creation and accessibility.[16] By late 2022, ElevenLabs had secured pre-seed funding from investors including Concept Ventures, enabling further model refinement without public disclosure until product readiness.[14] This foundational phase laid the groundwork for the company's beta platform launch in January 2023, marking the transition from internal development to broader testing and user adoption.[15]Key Milestones and Expansion
ElevenLabs was founded in April 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski and Mati Staniszewski as a research-focused company aiming to enable high-quality content across languages through AI voice technology.[1] In July 2023, the company secured an $8 million Series A funding round led by Javelin Venture Partners, marking its initial institutional backing for scaling voice synthesis capabilities.[1] The firm achieved a significant growth milestone in January 2024 with an $80 million Series B round, which supported the launch of expanded voice AI products including advanced cloning and multilingual support.[17] This funding accelerated product development amid rising demand for realistic text-to-speech applications. By late 2024, annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached approximately $90 million, reflecting adoption by over 60% of Fortune 500 companies.[18] In January 2025, ElevenLabs raised $180 million in a Series C round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Growth, valuing the company at $3.3 billion and enabling further infrastructure investments.[5] Strategic partnerships formed during this period included collaborations with Deutsche Telekom, LG Technology Ventures, and NTT DOCOMO to integrate voice AI into telecom and enterprise ecosystems.[19] Expansion efforts intensified, with the company teasing an initial public offering within five years while prioritizing global market penetration.[20] By September 2025, ElevenLabs reported $200 million in ARR, up from $120 million at the end of 2024, alongside a $100 million employee tender offer at a $6.6 billion valuation.[21] Headcount grew to 331 employees from 77 the prior year, with targeted scaling in key regions: UK staff increased from 18 to 68, US from 10 to 61, and overall European workforce expanded significantly.[22][23] Additional momentum came from a strategic investment by NVIDIA in September 2025, bolstering compute resources for AI model training.[24] These developments positioned the company for projected ARR growth to $300 million by 2026.[25]Recent Developments
In January 2025, ElevenLabs raised $180 million in a Series C funding round, tripling its valuation to $3.3 billion from the prior $1 billion-plus mark following its 2024 Series B.[5][26] The round included participation from investors such as Iconiq Growth and Salesforce Ventures, supporting expansion in AI voice technology amid growing enterprise demand.[27] By August 2025, the company achieved $200 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $120 million at the end of 2024, with enterprise revenue comprising a significant portion driven by tools for speech synthesis and voice cloning.[12][28] In September 2025, ElevenLabs facilitated an employee share sale valuing the company at $6.6 billion, doubling its Series C valuation and reflecting investor confidence in its generative audio capabilities.[23] The same month, it secured strategic investment from NVIDIA to advance AI audio infrastructure, following the launch of its AI film studio tool.[24] Product-wise, August 2025 saw the debut of Eleven Music, an AI music generation platform developed with licensing deals from Kobalt and Merlin to enable original composition creation while addressing copyright concerns through partnerships.[29] Earlier in June 2025, Voice Design v3 was introduced, enhancing customization with support for over 70 languages in Eleven v3 models.[30] The company expanded geographically, launching a Brazil campaign in September 2025 featuring comedian Fábio Porchat's AI voice and scaling operations in the UK and US.[31] In August 2024, it initiated free licenses for individuals with ALS or aphasia to preserve personal voices, extending accessibility efforts.[22] However, ElevenLabs faced scrutiny in late 2024 over alleged misuse of its voices in Russian disinformation campaigns, with reports citing platform exploitation for propaganda despite internal safeguards.[32] A lawsuit from actors claimed unauthorized use of recordings for AI training, alleging privacy and copyright violations, while separate criticism arose in January 2025 regarding the cloning of a deceased French actor's voice without family consent.[33][34] The firm's safety head emphasized in November 2024 that ethical challenges in AI deployment require broader regulatory input beyond company self-policing.[35]Technology
Core AI Models and Voice Synthesis
ElevenLabs' primary text-to-speech (TTS) models leverage deep learning architectures to generate lifelike speech with natural intonation, emotional expressiveness, and contextual adaptability, distinguishing them from earlier concatenative or parametric TTS systems that often produced robotic outputs.[36] The flagship model, Eleven v3, released on June 3, 2025, represents the company's most advanced synthesis technology, supporting over 70 languages and enabling features such as controllable emotions, multi-speaker dialogues, and audio tags for modulating pitch, pace, and intensity to achieve broad dynamic range.[37] This model processes textual inputs to output speech that approximates human variability, including subtle prosodic elements like emphasis and pauses, through neural networks optimized for high-fidelity audio generation.[38] Complementing Eleven v3, the Eleven Multilingual v2 model delivers emotionally nuanced speech in 29 languages, prioritizing voiceover quality and consistency for applications like audiobooks and media narration.[39] For latency-sensitive scenarios, such as real-time conversational agents, ElevenLabs offers Flash v2.5, achieving synthesis latencies as low as 75 milliseconds across 32 languages, and Turbo v2.5, balancing quality with 250-300 millisecond response times.[39] These models incorporate parameters for stability (controlling output consistency), clarity (enhancing intelligibility), and similarity (preserving voice identity), tunable via API to suit diverse use cases from scripted content to interactive systems.[39] Voice synthesis at ElevenLabs fundamentally relies on generative AI techniques, including transformer-based encoders for semantic understanding and diffusion processes tailored to audio waveforms, allowing for the creation of novel utterances beyond mere recombination of training data.[40] This approach enables zero-shot or few-shot adaptation, where models infer speaking styles from prompts without extensive retraining. For voice cloning, a specialized pipeline collects audio samples—often as few as seconds for instant clones or minutes for professional-grade replicas—trains a custom neural representation of the target's timbre, accent, and prosody, then synthesizes new content by conditioning the core TTS backbone on this embedding.[41] [42] Professional cloning, requiring 30+ minutes of high-quality input, yields near-perfect fidelity by fine-tuning on speaker-specific data, while instantaneous variants use pretrained embeddings for rapid deployment, though with trade-offs in precision.[43] Overall, these models achieve state-of-the-art performance metrics, such as low word error rates and high mean opinion scores in perceptual evaluations, through efficient training on modest compute resources like clusters of 32 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.[44]Advancements in Cloning and Expressiveness
ElevenLabs has advanced voice cloning through techniques enabling high-fidelity replication from minimal audio input, including instant cloning requiring only a few seconds to minutes of sample audio and professional cloning utilizing 1-3 hours of diverse, high-quality recordings for superior accuracy.[42][41] These methods employ neural architectures such as transformers or generative adversarial networks (GANs) to capture and synthesize unique vocal traits like timbre, pitch variation, and rhythm, achieving outputs often indistinguishable from the original speaker.[41] By June 2025, the platform supported multilingual cloning across over 70 languages, allowing seamless adaptation of cloned voices to non-native phonetics while preserving core characteristics.[42][45] In terms of expressiveness, ElevenLabs introduced controllable parameters including stability, similarity/clarity, and style sliders, which enable users to modulate emotional range, fidelity to the source voice, and stylistic exaggeration during synthesis.[46] Lowering stability introduces greater variability and emotional depth, reducing robotic uniformity, while style adjustments amplify inherent prosody for dynamic delivery.[46][47] The Eleven v3 Alpha model, released in June 2025, marked a significant leap by incorporating audio tags for precise emotional control, prosody modeling, and attention mechanisms that replicate human-like nuances in tone, pacing, and inflection, supporting multi-speaker dialogues and emotionally responsive outputs.[45][48] This model processes text inputs to generate performances rivaling professional voice acting, with adaptations for context-driven sentiment such as warmth or intensity.[41][49] These enhancements stem from iterative fine-tuning on extensive datasets, emphasizing feature extraction for natural flow and verification processes to mitigate artifacts like noise or inconsistency, as detailed in ElevenLabs' June 2025 technical overview.[41] Independent assessments in 2025 noted low word error rates and high pronunciation fidelity in cloned expressive speech, attributing improvements to reduced latency and advanced natural language processing integration.[50][51]Products and Services
Primary Offerings
ElevenLabs' primary offerings consist of AI-driven tools for speech synthesis, voice replication, and audio production, accessible via APIs, web interfaces, and specialized platforms. The core Text-to-Speech (TTS) API converts text inputs into natural, expressive audio, utilizing models such as Multilingual v2 for lifelike multilingual output and Eleven v3 (alpha) for controllable speech with layered emotions, audio events, and multi-speaker dynamics.[36][38] This supports over 70 languages and thousands of pre-built voices, with low-latency options like Flash v2.5 achieving 75ms response times for real-time applications such as voiceovers and audiobooks.[3][4] Voice cloning represents a key feature, enabling instant or professional replication of a speaker's voice from as little as seconds of audio, preserving nuances like intonation and accent across 29 languages.[42] Users can generate custom voices for applications requiring personalized narration, with safeguards against misuse integrated into the process.[52] The Dubbing Studio provides automated video translation and synchronization, dubbing content in 29 languages while cloning original speakers' voices or selecting alternatives to maintain authenticity.[53] This tool handles full workflows from source upload to output, supporting scalable localization for media production.[54] Complementing these, the Voice Design tool generates bespoke AI voices from text prompts, allowing customization of attributes including tone, age, pacing, and delivery for infinite variations.[55] ElevenLabs structures its services around two platforms: the Agents Platform, which deploys interactive voice agents capable of listening, conversing, and executing actions via integrations with large language models (LLMs) and telephony; and the Creative Platform, focused on content storytelling, localization, and accessibility enhancements.[3] These offerings are available through tiered plans from free trials to enterprise-level access, emphasizing API flexibility for developers.[56]Specialized Tools and Integrations
ElevenLabs provides a robust API for developers to integrate AI-driven voice synthesis, including text-to-speech, voice cloning, and low-latency models like Flash for dynamic applications such as chatbots and LLMs.[57] The API supports enterprise-grade features, including SOC2 compliance, GDPR adherence, end-to-end encryption, and no-retention modes to ensure data security during integration.[57] Officially supported libraries facilitate API access, with REST API SDKs available in Python and JavaScript (Node.js), kept updated with the latest features for streamlined development.[58] For the Agents Platform, which enables conversational AI agents, libraries extend to JavaScript, React, React Native, Python, Swift, and Kotlin, allowing cross-platform integration into web, mobile, and native apps.[58] Agents can be enhanced with specialized tools, including client-side tools for custom logic execution and server-side tools for dynamic interactions with external APIs, such as generating queries, bodies, and paths without traditional request formatting.[59] These tools enable agents to perform actions beyond text generation, like system integrations and task automation tailored to conversational contexts.[59] The platform includes over 400 pre-configured integrations for voice agents, categorized to connect with CRM systems for customer data management, telephony for voice calls, payment processors for transactions, retail operations, scheduling tools, data platforms, inference providers for LLM enhancement, and customer support systems to streamline workflows and reduce custom coding.[60]Business and Growth
Funding and Valuation
ElevenLabs has raised approximately $281 million in total funding across multiple rounds since its founding in 2022.[19] Key investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Iconiq Growth, NVIDIA, and Credo Ventures, among over 40 backers.[2] The company's funding trajectory reflects rapid investor interest in its AI voice synthesis technology, with valuations escalating amid growing demand for generative audio tools.| Date | Round | Amount Raised | Post-Money Valuation | Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 2023 | Series A | $19 million | Undisclosed | Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia |
| January 2024 | Series B | $80 million | $1.1 billion | Sequoia, Iconiq Growth |
| January 2025 | Series C | $180 million | $3.3 billion | Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia |