AI Startup ElevenLabs Raises $500M
AI startup ElevenLabs has raised $500 million in a new funding round, bringing its valuation to $11 billion. The significant capital injection underscores the intense investor interest and rapid scaling of companies in the generative AI and language model sector. The funding is expected to accelerate product development and market expansion.
- This Series D funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, with partner Andrew Reed joining the board of directors. Other participants included Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Bond. - The company was founded in 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski, a former Google machine learning engineer, and Mati Staniszewski, a former Palantir deployment strategist, who were inspired to improve the poor quality of dubbed American films they watched growing up in Poland. - ElevenLabs reported ending its 2025 fiscal year with over $330 million in annual recurring revenue, with 41% of Fortune 500 companies using its platform. - This latest funding round represents a significant increase in valuation for the company, which was valued at $1.1 billion in January 2024 and $3.3 billion in January 2025. - Beyond text-to-speech, the company has expanded its product offerings to include AI-powered dubbing in over 20 languages, a marketplace for voice cloning, and tools for creating interactive voice agents. - Its enterprise client roster includes major companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Meta, Salesforce, Epic Games, Duolingo, and NVIDIA. - The company operates in a competitive AI voice market alongside players like Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, Amazon Polly, and Microsoft Azure Speech, each vying for dominance in enterprise and creative applications.
