- ElevenLabs is in early talks for a secondary sale valuing it at roughly $22B, per Bloomberg.
- The tender would double its $11B Series D valuation from February 2026, without new capital.
- The deal is expected to close by September, but terms remain preliminary.
ElevenLabs is holding early talks with investors over a secondary share sale that would value the London-based AI voice company at roughly $22 billion, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter. If it lands anywhere near that number, the company will have doubled its valuation in under five months without raising a single dollar of new capital.
The discussions are described as preliminary, with terms still subject to change, and the tender offer is expected to close by September. Unlike a funding round, a secondary sale of this kind lets existing shareholders, chiefly employees, sell stock to new or existing investors while the business itself keeps the cash it already has.
A 20-fold climb in two and a half years
The story of how ElevenLabs got here is less a straight line than a steepening curve.
It closed a $500 million Series D in February 2026, led by Sequoia Capital, at an $11 billion valuation, with a16z and ICONIQ Capital among the backers. A third close of that same round in May 2026 pulled in BlackRock, Wellington Management, NVIDIA, Salesforce and Santander. Just five months before the Series D closed, in September 2025, ElevenLabs had run a $100 million employee tender offer at a $6.6 billion valuation, itself more than double the $3.3 billion mark set by its January 2025 Series C.
Founded in 2022 by childhood friends Mati Staniszewski, formerly of Palantir Technologies, and Piotr Dabkowski, a former Google machine learning engineer, ElevenLabs set out to fix something the two had complained about since they were teenagers in Warsaw: flat, poorly dubbed foreign films. That frustration led to the creation of a company built to make synthetic speech sound human in dozens of languages at low latency.
The technology has since broadened well past text-to-speech. ElevenLabs now offers voice cloning, multilingual AI dubbing, sound-effect generation, and conversational AI agents used by Salesforce, Cisco, Adobe, and Deutsche Telekom, among others, across customer service, publishing, gaming, and healthcare.
Annual recurring revenue reportedly reached $500 million in the first four months of 2026, up from $350 million at the end of 2025, and total funding raised now exceeds $800 million. That gives the valuation conversation at least some revenue underneath it, even if the multiple implied by $22 billion is still steep by any conventional measure.
Pricing retention
What is actually being priced here is retention. Secondary sales have become a standard tool for AI companies competing for scarce technical talent, without the disclosure burden or dilution associated with a public listing or a fresh primary round.
Employees get a way to realise gains on paper equity years before any IPO, while the company keeps them. ElevenLabs has now run this playbook twice in under a year, and each round has roughly doubled the previous one.
That pace invites obvious questions Tech Funding News will be watching for. The reporting so far does not disclose who would lead the buy side of the tender, how much stock employees would be permitted to sell, or whether ElevenLabs will pair the higher price with any further revenue disclosure.
A $22 billion stamp with no numbers underneath it is also a story rivals can tell about market froth rather than fundamentals.
Europe’s most valuable AI company, if the deal closes
Competition in AI voice has not slowed to match. OpenAI continues to expand voice features within ChatGPT; Hume AI has raised significant funding for emotionally responsive voice models; Cartesia is building low-latency speech infrastructure for real-time agents; and Speechmatics continues to grow its enterprise speech recognition business. ElevenLabs’ bet is that owning the full stack lets it outrun single-feature competitors even as the giants circle.
If the $22 billion figure holds, ElevenLabs would rank among Europe’s most valuable privately held AI companies, ahead of France’s Mistral, valued at close to $12 billion as of January 2026.
For a sector still short on European companies that can claim to compete with Silicon Valley on price alone, that would be a meaningful marker, provided the talks actually result in a signed deal by September.
