- ElevenLabs closed a $300M employee tender offer at a $22B valuation, twice its February level.
- Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price led the employee share sale, not a funding round.
- Its AI agents handle more than 15 million conversations a week, three times February’s level.
ElevenLabs is now valued at twice its February price, and the latest jump came from employees selling shares, not from the company raising money.
The British unicorn has closed a $300 million employee tender offer at a $22 billion valuation, double the $11 billion attached to its $500 million Series D in February. Sequoia led that round, with Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ also investing. This time, employees are selling vested shares to investors. The cash goes to the sellers, and Reuters notes that a tender can provide liquidity without the company necessarily raising new capital.
Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price led the deal. Wellington is not new to the company: Tech Funding News reported in July that it joined in May through the Series D’s third close, alongside BlackRock, NVIDIA, Salesforce, and Santander. EQT, Goldman Sachs, GIC, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Sapphire Ventures, and BDT & MSD invested in ElevenLabs for the first time, the company said.
Existing backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, ICONIQ, D.E. Shaw, Evantic, DISRUPTIVE, and Alkeon also took part.
Employees cash out for a second time
The sale follows a $100 million tender in September 2025 at a $6.6 billion valuation, led by existing investors Sequoia and ICONIQ. ElevenLabs had about 330 employees then and had just passed $200 million in annual recurring revenue, the company said at the time. It has more than 800 people now and says it wants to offer them liquidity regularly.
The valuation has more than tripled in about a year. CEO Mati Staniszewski said in the announcement that allowing staff to share in the value they create for customers is part of the company’s growth plan.
TFN reported in July, citing Bloomberg, that early talks were under way, and asked who would lead the sale and whether ElevenLabs would disclose more about revenue. The first question now has an answer. On the second, Staniszewski told TechCrunch on September 24 that annual recurring revenue is $600 million, with enterprise customers accounting for more than 55% of it.
What $22 billion is paying for
Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, childhood friends from Warsaw, founded ElevenLabs in 2022. The company says it raised its first round at a $9 million valuation, which makes the tender price more than 2,400 times that. The business has moved from text-to-speech for creators toward AI agents that talk to customers: handling refunds, renewing insurance policies, upgrading phone plans, and booking healthcare appointments.
ElevenLabs says its agents handle more than 15 million conversations a week, three times February’s level, and that revenue from its agent platform, ElevenAgents, has risen more than threefold over the same period. Enterprise accounts for 55% of total revenue.
The company says its technology is used daily at five of the 10 largest tech companies, five of the 10 largest insurers, and four of the 10 largest telecoms. Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, Admiral, Customers Bank, and the governments of Ukraine and Greece are among the customers deploying it.
The voice AI funding race
Money has followed the agents. AI voice startups raised $7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up from under $1 billion a year earlier, according to PitchBook data. MarketsandMarkets expects the AI voice generator market to grow from $4.16 billion in 2025 to $20.71 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of 30.7%.
Paris-based Gradium, spun out of research lab Kyutai, stretched its seed round by about $30 million in July to more than $100 million, with NVIDIA joining as an investor. Its four co-founders built EnCodec, SoundStream, and Moshi. Deepgram raised $130 million in a Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation in January. San Francisco-based Rime raised $24 million in a Series A led by M13 in July to build speech-to-speech models.
ElevenLabs says it often builds the application layer itself and sends forward-deployed engineers to tailor models and agents for each customer. Whether investors will pay $22 billion for newly issued shares is a separate question, and the reported next round could answer it.
