It’s not just AI model companies that are raking in the big bucks — consumer-facing AI apps too are seeing their valuations surge.
AI voice generating startup Eleven Labs has raised $180 million in a new round of funding. The Series C funding round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq Growth, with participation from additional new investors NEA, World Innovation Lab, Valor, Endeavor Catalyst Fund and Lunate. The round triples Eleven Labs’ valuation to $3.3 billion.
“We’ve raised a $180M Series C to give every AI agent a voice. The past year has been about building the foundations of AI audio – now we’re focused on making speech the standard for how we interact with technology,” the company said on X. “In just two months since launching Conversational AI, developers have created more than 250k customized AI agents, bringing voice AI to education, employee training, customer support, gaming, and entertainment.
Eleven Labs was co-founded in 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski and Mateusz Staniszewski, both of whom have extensive backgrounds in machine learning and technology deployment. Dąbkowski previously worked as a machine learning engineer at Google, while Staniszewski held a strategic role at Palantir. Both founders were raised in Poland, and their inspiration for founding ElevenLabs reportedly came from watching inadequately dubbed American films.
Eleven Labs is recognized as a leader in the synthetic voice space, competing with other firms like Descript and Voicemod. It allows users to generate realistic voices through its text-to-speech feature. It also has voice dubbing features in 32 languages, and also has voice changing and voice cloning features. Eleven Labs was used by podcaster Lex Fridman to dub voices in his interview with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Its voice generation features have also been used by Drew Carey and Seth Godin.