ElevenLabs

The lightning speed of generative AI is continually altering how we write, speak, and communicate. A component of that change is powered by ElevenLabs, a voice AI company that is re-thinking about how we create and engage with audio. With a sharp increase in demand for synthetic voice content around the world - everything from audiobooks to dubbing to conversational agents - ElevenLabs is enabling creators, developers and businesses to create hyper-realistic speech at scale in any voice or language.

Launched in 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski (ex-Google) and Mati Staniszewski (ex-Palantir), the firm has developed an incredible platform that provides text-to-speech, voice cloning, speech-to-speech, dubbing and sound effects generation - all delivered by deep learning models with powerful emotion, multilingual capabilities and a natural prosody. Its flagship product allows users to convert text into expressive, high-quality speech in more than 70 languages, with features that allow users to keep accent, tone and emotional delivery. From audiobook publishers to indie creators, ElevenLabs has quickly taken form as the industry's voice-technology infrastructure built on AI. The platform also helps developers create conversational-based AI agents that can interface in a natural, real-time manner through synthesized voices. In 2025 alone, over 250,000 agents were created using the company’s technology, and they are available for customer support, entertainment, and educational experiences. The ability to "voice clone" using the technology allows the user to replicate real human voices of others, or even use their own voice, in a vast array of content. To prevent unwanted or unethical usage, ElevenLabs implemented "watermarking" and inclusive moderation, enhanced by voice detection when the situation arises. ElevenLabs released a full CLI toolkit and API infrastructure in late 2024 to build scalable and type-agnostic voice AI technology. In Mid-2025, they released an advanced voice editing environment called "Projects," focused on enabling creators to design and manage long-form content with multiple speakers, scripted revisions and tagged emotions in a hierarchical editing interface. The firm also introduced  real-time dubbing, allowing films, YouTube and training videos to be immediately localized into different languages, while maintaining the vocal identity and original speaker's emotional experience. This product has attracted streaming companies with a distributed global audience and e-learning platforms.

In terms of funding, ElevenLabs is also one of the most well-backed AI companies working in the voice tech space, having collected $180 million from a Series C financing in January 2025, for a total financing of more than $250 million. It is important to highlight proudly that they had raised new financing at a valuation which had tripled to $3.3 billion. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the financing, and the syndicate included heavyweight investors including Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA Ventures, SV Angel, Craft Ventures, SMOK Ventures, Balderton Capital, Deutsche Telekom Ventures, and Credo Ventures. Moreover, in terms of revenue, it is currently estimated that the company runs a utilization based SaaS model with year-over-year (YoY) revenue run-rate somewhere between $40 - $50 million. It has various tiers of paid plans which include access to premium voices, commercial licenses, and API credits. Enterprise clients will typically negotiate custom pricing based on scale and use case, along with custom service level agreements. However, as exciting as this revenue number is, ElevenLabs is not public-for-profit yet. As with other AI SaaS technology companies in the growth phase it is solely focused on increasing its users, developing research and development, and investing in global infrastructure instead of focusing on maximizing profit today. Fortunately, it has strong positive gross margins, enormous scalability, and increasing demand, which has led analysts to speculate that its current growth ramp in the next 12-18 months will either get them to cash break even, or a publicly-for-profit entity.

ElevenLabs has been aggressive in terms of growth and expansion. In 2022, the company had a few dozen engineers — for now, it has grown to approximately 120 employees as of mid-2025, and has the services of research scientists, machine learning engineers, linguists, sound designers, and go-to-market strategists. This diversity makes it one of the most interdisciplinary AI teams imaginable. With headquarters in London, the company boasts offices in New York and Warsaw, and is actively expanding to offices in Bangalore, Singapore, and São Paulo. The aim is to facilitate localized language models and support non-English speaking markets. In India, a partnership with Meesho has powered upwards of 60,000 daily support calls in various regional languages—large evidence of how ElevenLabs is scaling globally and inclusively.

Even though the firm is experiencing tremendous growth it has to navigate an active competitive landscape. Prior to the launch of its product, the company had direct competition in the synthetic voice generation space from other services, including WellSaid Labs, Resemble AI, Voicery, and prominent platforms like Amazon Polly and Google Cloud TTS.The company does have a competitive advantage with its quality of voice, developer-first tools, and multilingual accuracy. Most of its voice models rival human nuance, emotion, and inflection that set a higher standard for most competitors and achieved greater indistinguishability from human voice. ElevenLabs provides features that competitors do not - emotion tagging, project-based workflows, multilingual dubbing - that help maintain its leadership position in a rapidly evolving space.

The company's mission is perhaps best summarised by CEO Mati Staniszewski. "We're building the universal voice interface; one that's natural, ethical, and available to everyone." That mission is quickly becoming a reality. With its scalable infrastructure, ethical protocols in place, and relentless will to ensure the highest quality, ElevenLabs are building not only tools, but a fundamental shift to how humans and machines communicate. As the firm’s presence grows in global territories, and the breadth of its offerings expands rapidly, they are positioning themselves to be both a leader in the voice AI market and a key layer in the future of media, communication, accessibility, and education. With a staggering $3.3 billion valuation, increasing number of global staff, and unrivalled voice synthesis capabilities, ElevenLabs is the voice of the AI future — quite literally!

Click here to access ElevenLabs's website.