AI is causing a lot of disruption, but the companies that are managing to ride the AI wave are growing at some truly astonishing speeds.
ElevenLabs, the AI voice platform startup, announced today a $500 million Series D funding round at an $11 billion valuation, more than tripling its $3.3 billion valuation from just one year ago. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Capital significantly increasing their stakes—a16z quadrupling its investment and ICONIQ tripling down.
The rise represents one of the steepest valuation increases in the AI sector for a company of its scale. In January 2025, the company raised $180 million in a Series C round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Growth that valued the company at $3.3 billion. Just twelve months later, that valuation has ballooned more than 3.3x, underscoring the explosive growth in AI voice technology and the company’s rapid commercial traction.
Agents Platform Drives Revenue Surge
The funding comes as ElevenLabs shifts its focus toward enterprise applications through ElevenAgents, its conversational AI agents platform. The platform is designed to help enterprises improve customer experience, empower revenue teams, and streamline internal operations—marking an evolution from the company’s roots in voice generation for creators and media.
According to CEO Mati Staniszewski, the agents platform has been instrumental in driving the company’s financial performance, with ElevenLabs on track to close 2025 with over $330 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company counts major enterprises and organizations among its customers, including Deutsche Telekom, Square, Deliveroo, Revolut, and the Ukrainian government.
“This funding reflects the trust of customers and partners building at the frontier alongside us—and gives us momentum to ship even faster,” Staniszewski said in announcing the round.
New Conversational Model and Expanded Capabilities
ElevenLabs is rolling out a new conversational model for its Agents Platform in the coming days. The upgraded model promises to be faster and more adept at understanding and expressing emotion, building on the company’s new v3 model. The release also includes improved orchestration with an enhanced turn-taking system, with an alpha version already available on the company’s website.
The company’s research efforts now span text-to-speech, speech-to-text, music, dubbing, and conversational models. Alongside the enterprise-focused ElevenAgents, ElevenLabs continues to develop ElevenCreative for creators, brands, and media companies.
From Dubbing to Dominating AI Voice
ElevenLabs was co-founded in 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski, a former Google machine learning engineer, and Mateusz Staniszewski, who previously held a strategic role at Palantir. Both Polish-born founders have cited their inspiration as coming from watching poorly dubbed American films—a problem their technology has since helped solve across 32 languages.
The company first gained recognition for its synthetic voice technology, competing with firms like Descript and Voicemod. Its voice generation features have been used by high-profile figures including podcaster Lex Fridman, who used ElevenLabs to dub his interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as celebrities Drew Carey and Seth Godin.
In just two months after launching its Conversational AI platform in late 2024, developers created more than 250,000 customized AI agents, bringing voice AI to education, employee training, customer support, gaming, and entertainment.
The company has scaled rapidly to a team of 400 employees. Staniszewski emphasized that despite the company’s success, the team “stays hungry, knowing how early this space still is” as they build toward an eventual IPO and beyond.