ElevenLabs -a voice technology research company and world leader in audio AI software – recently announced it has raised a $19 million Series A round to continue its voice AI research and product deployment – part of its mission to make all content universally accessible. The $19 million Series A round was co-led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Andreessen Horowitz with further participation from Credo Ventures, Concept Ventures, and an array of strategic angel investors including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus VR co-founder Brendan Iribe, Ubiquity6 co-founder Anjney Midha, Deepmind & Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, Runway co-founder Siqi Chen, Inkitt co-founder Ali Albazaz, Reface co-founder Dima Shvets, Perplexity AI co-founder Aravind Srinivas, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch,// O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly, Creator Ventures and SV Angel. Embark Studios, Storytel, and TheSoul Publishing also join this round as investors. And Andreessen Horowitz is taking a board seat.
ElevenLabs unveiled its Beta platform in January 2023 after spending 2022 developing audio AI models that could create the most versatile and contextually-aware AI voices. Since launching, ElevenLabs has amassed over 1 million registered users who have generated over 10 years’ worth of audio content.
ElevenLabs’ tools are able to turn any text into speech using synthetic voices, cloned voices, or by creating entirely new artificial voices that can be tailored according to gender, age, and accent preferences. And through its research, ElevenLabs has been able to achieve a new level of speech quality that is almost indistinguishable from a real human with sub-1 second latency.
The company’s platform has already been embraced across multiple creative verticals and sectors, from independent authors creating audiobooks, developers voicing characters in video games, supporting the visually impaired to access online written content, and powering the world’s first AI radio channel. And ElevenLabs has also launched a range of B2B partnerships, including with one of the world’s largest audiobook publishers Storytel, leading global content creator platform TheSoul Publishing, and game developers like Embark Studios and Paradox Interactive, and the creative media platform MNTN.
This funding round will be used to continue building ElevenLabs’ cutting-edge research hub for Voice AI and to launch a range of additional products to support specific market verticals such as publishing, gaming, entertainment, and conversational applications.
The company is taking an integrated approach to developing voice AI research and products. And in response to user demand, ElevenLabs is also announcing Projects – available now for early access – a highly sought-after production workflow for editing and creating dynamic, long-form spoken content.
Projects will give content creators like publishers and independent authors, access to a hitherto unavailable level of control over their AI-generated audio content. And it builds on the company’s research into long-form speech synthesis and audio ‘infilling’ to provide users with the ability to seamlessly generate entire dialogue segments, news articles, and even audiobooks without leaving the platform. And Projects aims to provide a ‘Google Docs’ level of simplicity and user-friendliness to audio creation.
Projects also join the ElevenLabs suite of products, which includes Speech Synthesis, a text-to-speech platform that leverages pre-existing synthetic voices, and VoiceLab, which is a workflow for creating a unique voice or digital version of an existing one. And the platform has also recently released access to Eleven Multilingual – a speech synthesis model, which can be used across major European languages.
These recent product developments are stepping stones towards developing an AI dubbing tool aimed for release later this year. And this will enable any video to be dubbed into any language in an engaging, effective, and scalable way, all while maintaining the original speaker’s voice. The company has been already conducting a number of tests with industry partners to enable AI dubbing at scale.
ElevenLabs is also unveiling its AI Speech Classifier. And this tool will enable anyone to upload an audio sample and find out whether the clip contains AI-generated audio from ElevenLabs. This product is the first of its kind in the generative audio space. It is now available to the public and to selected partners as an API. The release of the AI Speech Classifier is the latest step in the company’s push for transparency, and it is a cornerstone of its commitment to creating a safe generative media landscape.
KEY QUOTES:
“Over the last five months, we’ve seen our technology embraced by millions of creators, companies, and curious minds. We are right at the beginning of this journey and now with Nat, Daniel, and Andreessen Horowitz joining, we have the best partners as we continue on the ambitious path forward.”
“Our mission is to be the ultimate tool for storytelling, dissolving language barriers and putting all audiences in the reach of all content creators in a safe and responsible way. With an incredible, growing team and these exceptional investors, ElevenLabs is now ever closer to realizing its long-term goal of making all content universally accessible in any language and in any voice.”
– Mati Staniszewski, CEO and co-founder of ElevenLabs
“Since our inception in April 2022 we have focused on assembling a great team – one of the key factors for long-term success – and have built a unique team of talented, passionate and hard working people. With such a wonderful set of colleagues and partners, we are well on our way to realizing our ambition of completely breaking down language barriers with technology.”
– Piotr Dabkowski, CTO and co-founder of ElevenLabs
