ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs began operating in April 2022. Its founders, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, childhood friends who grew up in Poland, serve as chief executive officer and chief technology officer respectively. The two wanted to address the loss of emotion and intonation in the dubbing of foreign films and television, and the company initially operated as a remote team spread across countries.⁠[1]

Staniszewski recalled in an interview that the two used weekends to explore the project, invited early users to try it, and kept adjusting direction. He summarized the company’s approach as pursuing model research and product development at the same time, feeding real usage back into research and then testing improved models through the product. This is the founders’ own account of the startup process and product approach.⁠[2]

The company launched a public beta in January 2023. On June 20 it announced a $19 million Series A round co-led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry; its products then included text-to-speech and voice cloning, and it unveiled Studio for long-form audio production and the AI Speech Classifier for identifying audio generated by its own models.⁠[1]

On January 22, 2024, the company announced an $80 million Series B round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. At the same time it unveiled Dubbing Studio, for controlling the content and timing of translated dubbing, and the Voice Library, which lets verified users share voices and earn payment when others use them.⁠[3]

The announcement also previewed an early version of a mobile reader app designed to turn text and web pages into audio. Professional Voice Cloning at the time required users to read specified text for voice verification, combined with human review; such verification requirements are a different layer of product design from general voice synthesis capabilities.⁠[3]

On May 31, 2024, ElevenLabs released its Text to Sound Effects model to all users. It generates sound effects, short instrumental tracks, soundscapes, and a wide variety of character voices from a text prompt, and is aimed at users such as film and television studios, video game developers, and social media creators. To build the feature, the company partnered with ShutterstockShutterstockShutterstock is a stock and creative content platform headquartered in New York, United States, that licenses images, video, music, and editorial content to businesses and individuals and provides metadata for machine learning and generative artificial intelligence; it has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012 (ticker SSTK). In January 2025 it signed a merger agreement with Getty Images; the agreement was terminated on July 7, 2026, and the merger was not completed.Open the full entry and fine-tuned the model on Shutterstock’s library of licensed audio tracks.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On January 30, 2025, the company announced a $180 million Series C round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Growth at a valuation of $3.3 billion. Its business had expanded into real-time conversational agents, voice design, sound effects, and multilingual dubbing; ElevenReader offered audio reading of e-books, PDFs, and articles on iOS and Android.⁠[5]

Through its Impact Program, the company also worked with nonprofit organizations to provide voice technology for people who have lost the ability to speak. Partners it named at the time included Bridging Voice and the Scott-Morgan Foundation; the specific scale of the service is company-disclosed data and cannot be used to infer medical efficacy.⁠[5]

On June 3, 2025, ElevenLabs released a research preview of its Eleven v3 (alpha) text-to-speech model. It supports more than 70 languages and multi-speaker dialogue, and lets users insert square-bracket audio tags such as [excited], [whispers], and [sighs] into the text to control tone, emotion, and non-verbal reactions. The company said the main limitation of earlier voice models had not been sound quality but expressiveness.⁠[6][6][6][6]

The version required more prompt engineering than earlier models; the company recommended staying with v2.5 Turbo or Flash for real-time and conversational use cases for the time being, and a real-time version of v3 was still in development.⁠[6][6]

On August 5, 2025, ElevenLabs launched Eleven Music, which lets users generate music from natural language prompts with control over genre, style, and structure, with vocals or as instrumentals, in multiple languages including English, Spanish, German, and Japanese, and with the ability to edit the sound and lyrics of individual sections or of the whole song.⁠[7][7][7][7]

The company said the product was developed in collaboration with labels, publishers, and artists and was cleared for nearly all commercial uses, including film and television, podcasts, social media videos, advertisements, and games; the uses supported differ by plan.⁠[7][7]

On September 8, 2025, ElevenLabs announced a $100 million employee share tender offer at a valuation of $6.6 billion, led by existing investors Sequoia and ICONIQ. The announcement said the company hoped, by continuing to offer liquidity opportunities, to let employees realize part of the value they had created.⁠[8]

On November 11, 2025, ElevenLabs launched the Iconic Marketplace, a curated two-sided platform where companies can request access to the voices of iconic figures for projects and content. Actor Michael Caine partnered with the company and joined the platform; at launch, more than 25 other iconic voices were available, including those of Maya Angelou, Alan Turing, and Art Garfunkel. The company also partnered with agencies including CMG Worldwide to bring more legendary voices and estates to the platform.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9]

On the same day, at the first ElevenLabs Summit, the company revealed that actor Matthew McConaugheyMatthew McConaugheyMatthew McConaughey is an American actor, author and professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Dallas Buyers Club. His work includes Dazed and Confused, True Detective, Interstellar and the memoir Greenlights. He is also involved in philanthropy, sports ownership and business, and has been interviewed by School of Hard Knocks.Open the full entry had been an investor for several years; his newsletter, Lyrics of Livin’, launched a Spanish-language version powered by ElevenLabs that provides Spanish audio in his own voice.⁠[10][10][10]

On January 14, 2026, ElevenLabs announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom to bring its AI voice agents to the telecom company’s customer service via app and phone, offering voice support around the clock without waiting times. At the time of the announcement, the service had yet to roll out.⁠[11][11][11][11]

On February 2, 2026, ElevenLabs announced that Eleven v3 had left alpha and was generally available across all platforms. The company said that in testing, users preferred the new version 72% of the time, and that on an internal benchmark covering 27 categories across 8 languages, the model’s error rate in handling numbers, symbols, and specialized notation fell from 15.3% to 4.9%, a 68% reduction. These figures come from the company’s internal testing.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12]

On February 4, 2026, ElevenLabs announced a $500 million Series D round led by Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry at a valuation of $11 billion, with Sequoia partner Andrew Reed joining the board. The announcement said the company’s five funding rounds since 2022 totaled $781 million.⁠[13]

The company organized its products into three main businesses: ElevenAgents for enterprise voice and chat agents, with orchestration, monitoring, and integrations; ElevenCreative for audio creation, editing, and localization; and ElevenAPI, which offers model interfaces to developers. The funding announcement also set out plans to expand global operations and research and development; planned future investment should not be equated with completed build-out.⁠[13]

On April 16, Margaret Wood Hassan, ranking Democratic member of the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, wrote to Staniszewski asking how the company prevents its voice generation tools from being used for fraud. The questions covered verification of the consent of the person whose voice is used, handling of violating users, protection of public figures’ voices, and identification and provenance marking of generated audio. The letter is an information inquiry, not a judicial ruling that the company broke the law.⁠[14]

On April 29, 2026, ElevenLabs launched ElevenMusic, an AI-powered platform for music discovery and creation built in partnership with artists, labels, and publishers that brings listening, remixing, and original creation together in a single system. Artists can publish original tracks or remixes and earn money, with earnings depending on listener engagement, eligibility thresholds, and platform revenue.⁠[15][15][15][15][15]

At launch, more than 4,000 independent and emerging artists were already creating on the platform, and the curated album Eleven Album Vol. 2 was released alongside it. The company said it had already paid out more than $11 million to creators through the Voice Library and was extending a similar model to music.⁠[15][15][15]

On May 5, the company announced additional investors in the Series D round and said its annual recurring revenue (ARR) metric exceeded $500 million at the end of the first four months of 2026. ARR is an annualized measure of the scale of recurring business and cannot be directly equated with recognized full-year revenue. New institutions named in the announcement included BlackRockBlackRockBlackRock is a publicly traded investment management company headquartered in New York, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven others and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker BLK); its businesses include the iShares family of exchange-traded funds and the Aladdin investment and risk management platform. As of June 30, 2026, its assets under management totaled $15.3 trillion.Open the full entry, Wellington, D. E. ShawD. E. Shaw & Co.D. E. Shaw & Co. (the D. E. Shaw group) is a global investment and technology development firm headquartered in New York. Founded in 1988 by computer scientist David E. Shaw, it was an early pioneer of computational finance and systematic investing, and its businesses span multi-strategy hedge funds, private markets, active equity and multi-asset class strategies. As of September 1, 2026, it had more than US$115 billion in investment and committed capital.Open the full entry, Schroders, and NVIDIANVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry’s NVentures.⁠[16]

On June 8, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to explore cooperation on public service accessibility, AI safety research, and talent development. The company also announced an expansion of its London headquarters and plans to grow its UK headcount to 200; the memorandum and expansion targets do not mean that deployment across all public services has taken place.⁠[17]

On May 26, 2026, ElevenLabs released its Music v2 model, with better vocals, instrumentation, and arrangement across every genre and improved multilingual performance. The new version can regenerate any selected section of a track on its own, and can build a full song section by section, from intro to verse to chorus.⁠[18][18][18][18]

The model powers three platforms, ElevenMusic, ElevenAPI, and ElevenCreative; alongside the release, the company cut prices for both Music v1 and Music v2 by up to 50% on ElevenAPI and by up to 40% for ElevenCreative self-serve customers.⁠[18][18]

On June 18, 2026, ElevenLabs announced that the Government of Poland had taken a stake in the company through Vinci, part of the BGK Group, joining Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and ICONIQ as one of its investors.⁠[19][19]

The two sides also launched AI Lab Poland, a joint initiative bringing together capital, technology, science, and talent to help the next generation of Polish AI companies grow with global ambition from the start; partners named by the company included Centrum e-Zdrowia, LOT Polish Airlines, InPost, the University of Warsaw, and Piotr Fronczewski.⁠[19][19][19]

On June 22, 2026, ElevenLabs announced an expansion of its operations in California, planning to hire 173 people in the state across research, engineering, sales, and other functions and to invest millions of dollars. To support this, the company was awarded an incentive through the California Competes Tax Credit program administered by the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz), tied to its planned job creation and investment.⁠[20][20][20][20][20][20]

The company’s primary California hubs are San Francisco and Los Angeles; it also said it would explore with the state how voice AI could make public services more accessible, and that it was part of the Governor’s task force on countering tech-enabled fraud.⁠[20][20][20]

On September 2, ElevenLabs announced that Ashley KramerAshley KramerAshley Kramer is a technology executive who has been chief revenue officer of the voice AI company ElevenLabs since September 2026. She previously led enterprise sales at OpenAI and earlier served as chief marketing and strategy officer of GitLab, chief product officer and chief marketing officer of Sisense, and senior vice president of product and marketing at Alteryx.Open the full entry had joined as chief revenue officer, leading its global revenue function and partnership ecosystem and working directly with customers and partners. She previously led enterprise sales at OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry and earlier held senior leadership roles in sales, marketing, and product at GitLab, Alteryx, and Tableau.⁠[21][21][21][21][21]

On September 8, the company announced that Ethan Tandowsky had joined as chief financial officer. He joined Adyen’s finance team in 2016, helped take the company public in 2018, and became its CFO in 2023; at ElevenLabs he is responsible for scaling the financial infrastructure and shaping the company’s investment in research, product, and global expansion.⁠[22][22][22][22]

On September 10, ElevenLabs announced a multi-year licensing and strategic partnership agreement with Universal Music Group (UMG) to develop AI audio products for artists, songwriters, and fans. The first jointly developed platform was still in development at the time and was planned to offer remixes, mashups, and personalized voice experiences based on licensed music and participating artists.⁠[23]

The company made clear that the joint platform would be offered separately from its existing Music API and ElevenMusic, which serve, respectively, developers integrating the music model through an API and users generating and editing original songs; the agreement does not mean that UMG’s entire catalog is available for any use.⁠[23]

On September 28, 2026, ElevenLabs released the Eleven v4 text-to-speech model and its low-latency version, Eleven v4 Turbo. The company said both support more than 90 languages, improve emotional expression, multi-speaker dialogue, and voice consistency, and are available through ElevenAgents, ElevenCreative, and ElevenAPI.⁠[24]

On September 30, 2026, ElevenLabs announced that it had completed a $300 million employee share tender offer, raising its valuation to $22 billion, double the valuation of its February 2026 Series D round. Wellington Management and T. Rowe PriceT. Rowe PriceT. Rowe Price is a global asset management firm headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded by Thomas Rowe Price Jr. in 1937, it mainly provides active equity, fixed income, multi-asset, retirement, and alternative investment management. The group’s shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker TROW, and Rob Sharps serves as chair and chief executive officer.Open the full entry led the transaction, and the company said it would continue to offer employees liquidity opportunities.⁠[25]

New institutions entering in the transaction included BDT & MSD, EQTEQTEQT is a global private markets investment manager that originated in Sweden, with businesses spanning private capital, infrastructure, real estate, and secondaries. It was founded in 1994 by Conni Jonsson with the support of Investor AB, AEA Investors, and SEB, and listed in Stockholm in 2019; it has since expanded by integrating Exeter, LSP, Baring Private Equity Asia, and Coller Capital.Open the full entry, GICGICGIC is a long-term investment management institution wholly owned by the Government of Singapore, established in 1981 and headquartered in Singapore. It is entrusted with investing Singapore’s foreign reserves across equities, fixed income, private equity, real estate, and infrastructure, in order to preserve and enhance the reserves’ international purchasing power. The company is now named GIC Private Limited; its chairman is Lee Hsien Loong and its chief executive officer is Lim Chow Kiat.Open the full entry, Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension PlanOntario Teachers' Pension PlanOntario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) is a defined benefit pension plan that provides lifetime pensions to working and retired teachers in Ontario, Canada. It is administered by the independent Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board and headquartered in Toronto. It is Canada’s largest single-profession pension plan and invests globally in public and private equity, fixed income, real estate, infrastructure, natural resources, credit and venture capital, with net assets of C$303.2 billion as of June 30, 2026.Open the full entry (OTPP), and Sapphire Ventures. Existing investors Alkeon, Andreessen Horowitz, D. E. Shaw, DISRUPTIVE, Evantic, ICONIQ, and LightspeedLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry also participated; the company did not disclose the amounts purchased or stakes held by individual institutions.⁠[25]

In its same-day report, ReutersReutersReuters is an international news agency founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter and is now the news business of Thomson Reuters. It provides text, photo, video, and graphics coverage to media and institutional clients and distributes it through channels such as Reuters Connect.Open the full entry explained that an employee share tender allows employees and existing shareholders to sell shares they hold to investors, providing liquidity to sellers, as distinct from the company issuing new shares to raise funds. The $300 million share transfer therefore cannot be counted as new company funding.⁠[26]

In the transaction announcement, the company disclosed that its enterprise business accounted for 55% of revenue, that ElevenAgents handled more than 15 million conversations per week, about three times the level in February, with the product’s ARR more than tripling over the same period, and that its team had grown to more than 800 people. These are operating metrics the company gave in that announcement.⁠[25]

As of September 2026, the official help documentation distinguishes two voice cloning methods: Instant Voice Cloning requires users to have permission to clone the voice; Professional Voice Cloning can be created only in the speaker’s own account and must pass verification, after which the speaker may share it privately or add it to the Voice Library. Even with another person’s consent, users cannot create a Professional Voice Clone of that person in their own account.⁠[27][28]

ElevenLabs says it uses pre-release model testing, restrictions on high-risk voices, automated classification, and human review, and can ban violating users. Its public AI Speech Classifier is used to determine whether audio was generated by ElevenLabs, not to identify synthetic audio from all sources; its safety page also acknowledges that safeguards may block legitimate users or miss abusive behavior.⁠[29]