Recently, reports suggested that UK-born ElevenLabs was preparing to raise $250 million in a Series C funding round. Now, the British AI unicorn company has officially confirmed securing $180 million, aiming to establish speech as the new standard for digital interaction.The round was co-led by a16z and ICONIQ Growth (which invested in Databricks and Writer), with additional new investors NEA, World Innovation Lab (WiL), Valor, Endeavor Catalyst Fund and Lunate. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Smash Capital, SV Angel, NFDG, BroadLight Capital are also increasing their support. The company is further partnering with strategic investors, including Deutsche Telekom, LG Technology Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, and RingCentral Ventures. This latest funding values ElevenLabs at $3.3 billion, tripling its valuation from one year prior, and brings total funding to $281 million across four rounds since its founding in 2022. These include the $2 million pre-seed funding and $19 million Series A funding raised in 2023, the $80 million Series B round secured last year and the recent $180 million Series C round.
Growth and future vision
The newly secured funding will be used to advance AI-driven audio technology, with a focus on developing more expressive and controllable voice AI, enhancing global developer tools, and strengthening AI safety measures. Over the past year, the company has expanded its team from 30 to 120 employees, establishing hubs in London, New York, and Warsaw.Looking ahead to 2025, ElevenLabs plans to improve collaboration, expand mobile accessibility, and support a wider range of languages and dialects. It is also increasing its presence in Asia, LATAM, and EMEA, working with strategic investors to refine its technology. As research continues, the company remains focused on building innovative, secure, and globally impactful AI audio solutions.
How was the idea born?
ElevenLabs, an AI voice synthesis startup, was founded in 2022 by ex-Google and Palantir engineers Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski. They aim to create hyper-realistic AI-generated voices that could narrate audiobooks, games, and other media with human-like nuance in the voice of celebrities. Basically, an AI tool capable of replicating actors’ voices with high accuracy. This technology allows fans to hear the voices of late Hollywood icons like Judy Garland and James Dean narrate books, articles, and other digital content.Frustrated by robotic-sounding text-to-speech (TTS) systems, they developed AI models capable of generating expressive, multilingual voices. The company quickly gained traction, securing funding and partnerships across media and entertainment.
Product offerings
ElevenLabs is on a mission to build the singular most comprehensive audio AI platform in the world, solve AI audio intelligence, and make all information accessible in any voice, language, and sound. It has refined its voice AI models and introduced new products like Conversational AI, enabling real-time, natural speech for AI agents, and ElevenReader, a mobile app. In the past year alone, the company added new tools for speech generation, voice design, sound effects, AI-powered dubbing in 32 languages, and more. These include:
- Conversational AI for building custom, interactive voice agents for customer support, gaming, education, marketing, and more.
- Voice Design for generating custom voices from text descriptions.
- Sound Effects Model for generating sound effects from text descriptions, marking ElevenLabs’ expansion into audio AI beyond voice applications.
- ElevenReader App, an iOS and Android mobile app that converts ebooks, PDFs, and news articles into audio, making content easy to consume on the go.
- Flash Model, the fastest voice model on the market, with 75ms model latency.
- Voice Library Payouts, which is a platform for voice actors and users to monetise their AI-generated voices.
- Dubbing Studio that translates and edits audio content while preserving the original voices.
“Speech is how we naturally communicate. This funding moves us closer to a world where digital interactions happen by voice – fluid, natural, and as effortless as a conversation,” said Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs.“Voice is becoming a key part of how we interact with technology, and ElevenLabs is making it work at scale. We’re thrilled to continue to support their work in building the next generation of AI,” said David George, general partner and head of a16z’s Growth Fund.“We believe ElevenLabs is redefining the way we connect with digital environments, placing voice at the very heart of these transformative interactions. We are thrilled to partner with such an innovative team and contribute to their extraordinary journey to help reshape the future of voice technology,” added Seth Pierrepont, General Partner at ICONIQ Growth.
