ElevenLabs
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Technology, Artificial intelligence, Speech synthesis |
| Founded | 2022 |
| Founder | Piotr Dąbkowski, Mati Staniszewski |
| Headquarters | Poland |
| Products | AI-enhanced text-to-speech software, Conversational AI platform, Voice Marketplace, AI Dubbing Studio, ElevenLabs Reader App, Voice Isolator, Speech-to-text system (Scribe), Eleven Music |
| Website | elevenlabs |
ElevenLabs Inc. is a technology firm focused on creating highly naturalistic speech synthesis through advanced deep learning techniques.
History
Founded in 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski, a former Google machine learning specialist, and Mati Staniszewski, previously a deployment strategist at Palantir, ElevenLabs has its roots in Poland. The founders were motivated by the subpar quality of American film dubbing they experienced.
After evaluating multiple financing avenues, ElevenLabs successfully closed a $2 million pre-seed investment round in January 2023, led by Credo Ventures with participation from Concept Ventures. Their emphasis on AI-driven voice intelligence—a relatively untapped sector in Europe—captured early-stage investor interest.
The company made its beta platform accessible to the public in January 2023. By June 2023, ElevenLabs secured $19 million in a Series A funding event, achieving a valuation of $100 million. This round was jointly led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, alongside former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and entrepreneur Daniel Gross. Additional investors included SV Angel, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, and O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly. Following the investment, Andreessen Horowitz joined the company’s board.
On January 22, 2024, the company raised $80 million during a Series B round spearheaded by Andreessen Horowitz, Friedman Fleischer & Lowe, Daniel Gross, and Sequoia Capital, which elevated ElevenLabs’ valuation to $1.1 billion. Concurrently, they unveiled new offerings such as the Voice Marketplace, AI Dubbing Studio, and a dedicated mobile application.
Later, on January 30, 2025, ElevenLabs announced a $180 million Series C funding round co-led by a16z and ICONIQ Growth that boosted its valuation to $3.3 billion. New participants included NEA, World Innovation Lab (WiL), Valor, Endeavor Catalyst Fund, and Lunate. Strategic investors joining this round comprised Deutsche Telekom, LG Technology Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, and RingCentral Ventures.
Products
ElevenLabs is widely recognized for its AI-enhanced text-to-speech software accessible via web browsers. Their Speech Synthesis technology generates realistic speech by incorporating vocal emotion and nuanced intonation. Additionally, they offer Conversational AI—a developer platform designed for creating interactive voice agents. Their models analyze textual context to modulate intonation and rhythm dynamically while employing sophisticated algorithms to detect emotions such as anger, sadness, joy, or alertness. This approach results in speech that closely mimics human inflection patterns. The company is actively pursuing patents to protect this innovation. Through their beta platform, users can produce audio from default voices or upload personalized voice samples to craft unique vocal styles using voice cloning tools.
The Voice Library provides an extensive collection of pre-built voice profiles created with proprietary Voice Design technology, allowing users to select suitable voices without building them from scratch. It currently hosts over 1,000 community-generated voices. Meanwhile, VoiceLab enables users to clone voices from brief audio clips or create entirely synthetic voices from the ground up.
In June 2023, ElevenLabs introduced the AI Speech Classifier accessible via API, designed to detect whether audio content was generated using ElevenLabs’ AI systems. The company envisions collaborating with industry partners to establish a universal detection standard.
July 2023 saw the launch of "Projects," a tool facilitating the production of long-form spoken content such as audiobooks and dialogues that use context-aware synthetic or custom voices; this feature was released publicly in September. In August 2023, ElevenLabs expanded its voice generation capabilities to support 28 languages through an internally developed AI model capable of identifying languages including Korean, Dutch, and Vietnamese for producing emotionally expressive multilingual speech. That month also marked the official end of their beta phase.
In October 2023, ElevenLabs debuted "AI Dubbing," which translates speech into over twenty languages while retaining the original speaker’s voice characteristics, emotions, and intonation using proprietary methods for noise reduction, speaker separation, transcription accuracy, and synchronization.
May 2024 highlighted demonstrations from their upcoming text-to-music model (not yet publicly available). The following month featured the release of the ElevenLabs Reader App on iOS and Android platforms for listening to articles, PDFs, and ePubs narrated by AI voices. July 2024 introduced "Voice Isolator," designed to eliminate background noise from audio recordings. November 2024 brought Conversational AI capabilities for developing interactive voice agents.
In February 2025, ElevenLabs launched a platform enabling authors to produce and distribute AI-generated audiobooks directly within the Reader app. Later that month saw the debut of Scribe—a speech-to-text system offering character-level timestamps and speaker diarization with top-tier word error rate accuracy.
June 2025 marked the release of Eleven v3: an advanced text-to-speech model supporting more than seventy languages alongside features such as natural multi-speaker conversations and expressive audio tags like [excited], [whispers], and [sighs].
August 2025 featured the introduction of Eleven Music—an AI-driven music composition tool developed in partnership with record labels, publishers, and artists. Approved for commercial use across film, television, podcasts, social media videos, advertisements, and gaming content, it allows users to generate studio-quality music from natural language prompts. The platform provides granular control over genre selection, stylistic elements, song structure, vocal tracks (available in multiple languages including English, Spanish, German, Japanese), plus advanced editing options for individual segments or entire pieces. Built upon proprietary AI models crafted by ElevenLabs’ research team, it produces real-time music with seamless transitions between genres and instruments while adhering to complex lyrical themes and musical keys or tempos.
Reception
Following its debut in January 2023, ElevenLabs rapidly attracted attention, earning acclaim for delivering superior voice quality, swift generation speeds, and a notably "generous free tier." The platform distinguished itself by accurately articulating uncommon names, overcoming a frequent shortcoming in comparable tools that primarily focus on Western nomenclature. By June 2023, the company had surpassed one million registered users.
Criticism and controversy
ElevenLabs encountered backlash as some users leveraged the software to fabricate contentious statements impersonating celebrities, political figures, and other well-known individuals, particularly on sites like 4chan. This misuse raised ethical issues related to identity fraud and intellectual property infringement, drawing parallels to audio deepfake technology.
Prior to the January 2024 New Hampshire Democratic primary, robocalls created with AI technology mimicked Joe Biden’s voice to discourage voter participation. Investigations by the New Hampshire attorney general traced these calls back to a Texas-based firm, while audio analysts identified ElevenLabs’ technology as the tool employed. CEO Mati Staniszewski reaffirmed the company’s dedication to curbing abuse but refrained from addressing specific incidents.
Additional disputes emerged concerning the ethical sourcing of ElevenLabs’ training data, as multiple voice actors alleged their vocal likenesses were utilized without obtaining permission.