Startups developing voice AI technology secured over $398 million in venture capital funding during 2024, according to data from PitchBook. UK-born ElevenLabs, a company specialising in generative audio AI, has emerged as a key player in this sector. The company is known for its voice cloning technology, which enables the replication of human voices with high accuracy. ElevenLabs achieved unicorn status in January 2024, reaching a valuation of $1 billion.Several reports indicate that ElevenLabs is now raising $250 million in a Series C funding round led by ICONIQ Growth. If completed, this funding could value the company at $3 billion.While TFN is attempting to confirm the details with ElevenLabs, we thought to churn out some facts about the British AI unicorn.
ElevenLabs: Funding history
As of January 2025, ElevenLabs has completed four funding rounds:
-
- Pre-Seed (Jan 2023): $2 million, led by Credo Ventures and Concept Ventures.
- Series A (June 2023): $19 million, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross.
- Series B (Jan 2024): $80 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and others.
- Series C (Jan 2025): $250 million, led by ICONIQ Growth, with contributions from Andreessen Horowitz.
Founding and mission
Founded in 2022 by childhood friends Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, ElevenLabs was inspired by the poor dubbing of American movies they encountered growing up in Poland. Dabkowski, formerly a machine learning engineer at Google, and Staniszewski, previously with Palantir Technologies, launched the company to create AI tools that make content universally accessible in any language or voice.The company operates from its headquarters in the U.S. and has a London office. It serves over one million registered users across industries like entertainment, publishing, and creative content.
Bringing back dead celebs
ElevenLabs introduced 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.The company secured agreements with the estates of actors such as Laurence Olivier, Judy Garland, James Dean, and Burt Reynolds to include their voices in a library of AI-generated options available on ElevenLabs’ Reader App. This app enables users to listen to text-based content on their phones, with these celebrity voices accessible for individual streaming.However, the technology has sparked ethical debates, particularly around the use of AI to replicate the voices of deceased individuals for commercial purposes, such as audiobook narration.
Product offerings
ElevenLabs provides tools and products focused on AI-powered audio solutions:
- Voice Marketplace: A platform for creating and monetising AI voice replicas.
- AI Dubbing Studio: A tool for dubbing films and generating transcripts, translations, and timecodes.
- Mobile App Reader: Converts text and URLs into audio for on-the-go consumption.
- Speech Synthesis: Offers realistic text-to-speech conversion, including a Turbo model for low-latency performance.
- Voice Design and Cloning: Enables the creation of customised voice replicas.
- Speech-to-Speech Transformation: Transforms one voice into another while retaining natural sound.
- AI Dubbing Tool: Translates audio and video content into 29 languages, maintaining original voice characteristics and emotions.
Partnerships
ElevenLabs collaborates with partners such as Storytel, TheSoul Publishing, and MNTN. Its technology has been used by publications like Time to narrate text articles and by companies like Nvidia to translate corporate videos.The tools are also widely adopted by independent authors for creating audiobooks, by game developers for generating character voices, and by organisations supporting visually impaired individuals to access text-based content in audio format.
