The firm secures $500 million in a funding event spearheaded by Sequoia Capital; investors Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq also took part, ElevenLabs stated in a declaration issued on Wednesday. Sequoia’s Andrew Reed will be appointed to the company’s directorial board.
ElevenLabs intends to utilize the acquired capital to advance its technology, notably the creation of a platform that will empower enterprise clients to leverage AI-powered conversational agents for customer assistance, personnel training, sales activities, and other functionalities. The company’s CEO, Maty Stanishevski, characterized this direction as a crucial growth stimulant. Furthermore, ElevenLabs is broadening its global footprint by establishing offices in over a dozen cities across America, the Asia-Pacific region, and Europe.
As per Stanyshevsky, the company has forged alliances with entities such as Deutsche Telekom AG, Deliveroo Plc, Revolut, as well as the Ukrainian government. He disclosed this information via a post on LinkedIn.
Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital and investment technology firm BOND entered the funding round as novel investors. Additional participants in the transaction might be unveiled later this month. ElevenLabs’ prior financing endeavor occurred in early 2025 at a valuation of $3.3 billion; however, in light of robust investor engagement, the company authorized employees to liquidate a portion of their shares last year at a valuation of $6.6 billion.
Technology sector investors persist in actively allocating capital to artificial intelligence-related enterprises, spanning from implemented solutions to data centers. For example, Anthropic, the developer of the extensive language model Claude, is engaged in a secondary transaction that will enable certain personnel to divest shares at a company valuation of $350 billion, concurrent with the preparation of a financing round, the sum of which may surpass $20 billion.
ElevenLabs was co-founded by Mata Staniszewski and Piotr Dombkowski, a former Google machine learning engineer. The impetus for the project originated from the substandard dubbing of Hollywood movies they viewed as children in Poland, which propelled them to cultivate technology capable of realistic dubbing for films, audiobooks, and online courses.
Concurrently, voice cloning capabilities encountered challenges early on due to the misuse of the technology by fraudsters to generate deepfakes, prompting the company’s management to intensify oversight of users misusing AI. In 2024, one user was sanctioned for crafting an audio deepfake featuring the voice of former US President Joe Biden, wherein individuals were dissuaded from participating in the primaries in the state of New Hampshire.
Source: Bloomberg