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 New York HQ onMadison Avenue | |
| Company type | Private |
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| Industry | |
| Founded | 2022; 4 years ago (2022) |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | London[1] |
| Products |
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| Services | |
Number of employees | 400 (2026)[2] |
| Website | elevenlabs |
ElevenLabs Inc. is a software company that specializes in developing natural-soundingspeech synthesis software usingdeep learning.
ElevenLabs was co-founded in 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski, an ex-Google machine learning engineer andMati Staniszewski, an ex-Palantir deployment strategist.[3] Both were raised inPoland, and their inspiration for founding ElevenLabs reportedly came from watching inadequatelydubbed American films.[4][5]
Dąbkowski and Staniszewski initially considered different funding options, including the possibility of collaborating with a startup accelerator. In January 2023 they revealed having secured a $2 million pre-seed round. The startup's specialization in AI voice intelligence, a still-emerging field inEurope, played a significant role in attracting investors. The pre-seed funding was primarily led by Credo Ventures, and joined by Concept Ventures.[6]
In January 2023, ElevenLabs publicly released itsbeta platform.[7]
In June 2023, ElevenLabs raised a $19 millionSeries A funding round at a valuation of about $100 million.[8][9][5] The funding round was co-led by the venture capital firmAndreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEONat Friedman, and entrepreneurDaniel Gross. It also saw participation from prominent individuals such asSV Angel,Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram),Brendan Iribe (co-founder ofOculus),Mustafa Suleyman (co-founder ofDeepmind), andTim O'Reilly (founder ofO'Reilly Media). It was also announced that Andreessen Horowitz would be joining ElevenLabs' board.[4]
On January 22, 2024, ElevenLabs raised an additional $80 million inSeries B funding raising the total valuation of the company to $1.1 billion. The funding round was led byAndreessen Horowitz,Friedman, Gross, andSequoia Capital. Additionally, the company announced a series of new products, including their Voice Marketplace, AI Dubbing Studio, and mobile app.[10]
On January 30, 2025, ElevenLabs announced their $180 millionSeries C funding raising the total valuation of the company to $3.3 billion. The round was co-led bya16z andICONIQ Growth with additional new investors NEA, World Innovation Lab (WiL), Valor, Endeavor Catalyst Fund and Lunate and brought on strategic investors including Deutsche Telekom, LG Technology Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, and RingCentral Ventures.[11]
On 4 February 2026, ElevenLabs announced that it raised $500 million at an $11 billion valuation, as it eyes a potentialIPO.[12]
ElevenLabs is primarily known for itsbrowser-based, AI-assisted text-to-speech software, Speech Synthesis, which can produce lifelike speech by synthesizingvocal emotion andintonation, and now Conversational AI, a developer platform for launching interactive voice agents.[13] The company states that its models are trained to interpret the context in the text, and adjust the intonation and pacing accordingly.[14] It uses advanced algorithms to analyze the contextual aspects of text, aiming to detect emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, or alarm, which enables the system to understand the user's sentiment,[15] resulting in achieving a more realistic and human-like inflection. The startup is in the process of patenting this technology.[6] On its beta site, users can submit text and generateaudio files from a selection of default voices. Paying users are given the ability to upload custom voice samples to create new vocal styles using the company's voice cloning tool.[16]
Voice Library is the company's feature for sharing unique voice profiles created using their Voice Design technology. These pre-designed voice profiles allow users to select a voice that best suits their needs, rather than creating one from scratch.[17] There are now more than 1,000 community-created voices in the library. Another tool called VoiceLab allows users to clone voices from just a few short snippets of audio and can create entirely new synthetic voices.[4]
On 20 June 2023, ElevenLabs released an AI recognition tool called the AI Speech Classifier, which it claims is the first of its kind.[4] The tool is accessible through anAPI and designed to determine if an uploaded audio sample originates from ElevenLabs' proprietary AI technology.[5] The company has expressed its intention to collaborate with other AI developers in creating a universal detection system that could be adopted industry-wide.[18]
In July 2023, ElevenLabs announced "Projects", a tool for creating long-form spoken content such as audiobooks and dialogue segments with contextually-aware synthetic or custom voices.[5][19] The tool was released in September. In August, ElevenLabs expanded its voice generation capabilities to 28 languages. Using an in-house AI model, it automatically detects languages likeKorean,Dutch, andVietnamese, allowing for "emotionally rich" multilingual speech generation. The company also announced that its technology had officially exited itsbeta phase.[20][21]
In October 2023, ElevenLabs presented "AI Dubbing," a tool that is able to translate speech into more than 20 languages. The feature is capable of preserving the speaker's original voice, emotions, and intonation, by employing proprietary methods to handle tasks like noise removal, speaker differentiation, transcription, and synchronization of translated speech with the original audio.[22]
In May 2024, ElevenLabs shared samples from theirtext-to-music model, though it is not yet available for public use.[23] In June 2024, ElevenLabs released the ElevenLabs Reader App on iOS and Android which allows users to listen to articles, PDFs, and ePubs with AI Voices on their phone.[24] In July 2024, ElevenLabs released "Voice Isolator" which removes background noise from audio.[25] In November 2024, they released Conversational AI, a developer platform for launching interactive voice agents.[26] In February 2025, the company introduced a new platform that enables authors to create and publish AI-generated audiobooks directly on its Reader app.[27] Later that month, the company released Scribe, a speech-to-text model that transcribes audio with character-level timestamps and speakerdiarization[28] with industry-leadingword error rate according to internal benchmarks and third party tests from Artificial Analysis.[29]
In June 2025, ElevenLabs released Eleven v3, a new text-to-speech model that supports more than 70 languages, natural multi-speaker dialogue, and audio tags like [excited], [whispers], and [sighs].[30]
In August 2025, ElevenLabs launched Eleven Music, an AI music generator that enables users to generate studio-grade music from natural language prompts.[31] The platform was developed in collaboration with record labels, publishers, and artists, and is cleared for commercial use across various applications including film, television, podcasts, social media videos, advertisements, and gaming. Eleven Music provides control over genre, style, and structure, allowing users to create tracks with or without vocals in multiple languages including English, Spanish, German, and Japanese. The platform features advanced editing capabilities that enable users to modify individual sections of songs or entire compositions. Built with a proprietary AI music model developed by ElevenLabs' research team, the system can generate real-time music with seamless genre and instrument blending while closely following complex, multi-layered prompts for lyrics, key, and tempo specifications.[32]
Following its launch in January 2023, ElevenLabs gained rapid momentum and was commended for its voice output quality, fast generation times, and a "generous free tier". It has also been praised for its ability to accurately pronounce names with unique or uncommon pronunciations, addressing a common shortcoming in similar tools that often cater primarily to Western names.[33] The company reached over one million registered users between its launch and June 2023.[4][5][34]
In April 2025, ElevenLabs was featured in theForbes AI 50 list.[35]
ElevenLabs was criticized after users were able to abuse its software to generate controversial statements in the vocal style of celebrities, public officials, and other famous individuals,[36][37][38][39][40] particularly attracting attention after users on4chan used the tool to share hateful messages.[41][18] The software's ability to closely replicate real voices has raised ethical concerns overimpersonation andplagiarism, with critics likening it todeepfaking.[42]
In the leadup to theJanuary 2024 New Hampshire democratic primary, AI-generated robocalls purportedly fromJoe Biden encouraging voters to skip voting on the day of the primary were sent to thousands of residents. The New Hampshire attorney general's office launched an investigation into the incident and linked it to a company based in Texas, with audio experts concluding the call was made using ElevenLabs. In response to the incident, CEO Mati Staniszewski stated that the company was “dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools” but provided no comment on specific incidents.[43]
Additional concerns have been raised over the ethics of the source of ElevenLabs' training data, with multiplevoice actors saying that ElevenLabs used samples of their voices without their consent.[44]
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