ElevenLabs announced it has raised $180 million in Series C funding to make speech the new standard for digital interaction. This funding round was co-led by a16z and ICONIQ Growth, with additional new investors NEA, World Innovation Lab (WiL), Valor, Endeavor Catalyst Fund, and Lunate. And existing investors Sequoia Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Smash Capital, SV Angel, NFDG, BroadLight Capital are also increasing their support. The company is also further partnering with strategic investors, including Deutsche Telekom, LG Technology Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, and RingCentral Ventures. This latest funding values ElevenLabs at $3.3 billion, tripling its valuation from one year before and bringing the total funding to $281 million across four rounds since its founding in 2022.
Since launching its platform in January 2023, ElevenLabs refined its voice AI models. They launched new products like Conversational AI, enabling real-time, natural speech for AI agents, and ElevenReader, a mobile app. In the past year alone, ElevenLabs has broadened its product lineup, adding tools for speech generation, voice design, sound effects, AI-powered dubbing in 32 languages, and more:
1.) Conversational AI – A tool for building custom, interactive voice agents for customer support, gaming, education, marketing, and more.
2.) Voice Design – A tool for generating custom voices from text descriptions.
3.) Sound Effects Model – A tool for generating sound effects from text descriptions, marking ElevenLabs’ expansion into audio AI beyond voice applications.
4.) ElevenReader app – An iOS and Android mobile app that converts ebooks, PDFs, and news articles into audio, making content easy to consume on the go.
5.) Flash Model – The fastest voice model on the market, with 75ms model latency.
6.) Voice Library Payouts – A platform for voice actors and users to monetize their AI-generated voices. ElevenLabs recently surpassed $2 million in payouts.
7.) Dubbing Studio – A localization tool that translates and edits audio content while preserving the original voices.
These technologies are used by creators, developers, and businesses to power content creation, customer support, gaming, education, and accessibility, and others.
ElevenLabs works with major enterprises and institutions, while capitalizing on growing consumer demand. Since January 2023, creators have shared over 5,000 voices in ElevenLabs’ Voice Library and earned over $2 million in rewards. And the company has also launched its Impact Program, offering its technology for free to organizations that can benefit from AI developments, partnering with 80 organizations across accessibility, education, and culture.
Digital interactions often fall short of being realistic so ElevenLabs pioneered solutions to make them seamless and expressive. And one key effort is its Conversational AI tool, which has already enabled developers to build more than 250,000 conversational AI agents just two months after launch. And Fortune 500 companies have also adopted ElevenLabs at scale, with employees at over 60% of them using its platform and API. ElevenLabs’ models have localized more than 1 million hours of audio, read aloud 1 million hours of text from ebooks, PDFs, and news articles through ElevenReader, and produced more than 10 million sound effects. Together, these milestones represent 1,000 years of AI audio generated with ElevenLabs.
KEY QUOTES:
“Speech is how we naturally communicate. This funding moves us closer to a world where digital interactions happen by voice – fluid, natural, and as effortless as a conversation.”
- Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs
“Voice is becoming a key part of how we interact with technology, and ElevenLabs is making it work at scale. We’re thrilled to continue to support their work in building the next generation of AI.”
- David George, general partner and head of a16z’s Growth Fund
“We believe ElevenLabs is redefining the way we connect with digital environments, placing voice at the very heart of these transformative interactions. We are thrilled to partner with such an innovative team and contribute to their extraordinary journey to help reshape the future of voice technology.”
- Seth Pierrepont, General Partner at ICONIQ Growth
