Breaking new ground in the voice AI industry, ElevenLabs has successfully raised an impressive $80 million in its Series B funding round, co-led by industry giants like Andreessen Horowitz, alongside the former CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman, and notable entrepreneur Daniel Gross. Featuring investments from esteemed firms such as Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, SV Angel, BroadLight Capital, and Credo Ventures, the company's financial backing has reached a total of $101 million, launching its valuation into the unicorn league at over $1 billion—an exponential rise from approximately $100 million just the previous year.
With an ambitious agenda for the injection of capital, CEO Mati Staniszewski outlines plans for aggressive product development, infrastructure expansion, team growth, AI research, and the implementation of robust safety measures to guarantee ethical AI progression. "Our vision with this new investment is to solidify ElevenLabs' leadership in global voice AI, both in pioneering research and practical application," Staniszewski conveyed to TechCrunch in a correspondence.
The brainchild of Piotr Dabkowski, an ex-Google machine learning engineer, and Staniszewski, a former Palantir strategist, ElevenLabs was born out of a shared vision to improve voice cloning capabilities, spurred by the duo's experiences with subpar dubbed films in their home country of Poland. Since its beta inception a year prior, the company has swiftly become renowned for its browser-based application that ingeniously synthesizes voices that can be fine-tuned for intonation, emotion, and pacing, among other vocal nuances.
Offering both complimentary and premium services, ElevenLabs allows users to input text for vocal rendition or to submit voice samples for personalized voice cloning. The company’s commitment to innovation extends to creating specialized speech generation for industries including audiobooks, film dubbing, game characters, and promotions.
One of their groundbreaking developments, introduced the previous year, is a 'speech to speech' tool tailored to preserve the unique characteristics of a speaker’s voice while excising unwanted background noise and skillfully aligning dubbing for cinematic and television content. Looking ahead, ElevenLabs is on the verge of unveiling an advanced dubbing studio workflow and a mobile app designed to narrate web pages and text through its proprietary voice technology.
The company's innovations have attracted a diverse customer base, including game developer Paradox Interactive and prestigious media outlet The Washington Post. Staniszewski takes pride in sharing that ElevenLab users have generated over a century's worth of audio content, and it is now a favored tool among employees at a substantial 41% of Fortune 500 companies.
The burgeoning space of AI-driven voice technology parallels iterative growth in no-code platforms like AppMaster, which democratize application development for a diverse array of users. As ElevenLabs continues to ascend in the ranks of innovative technology firms, its trajectory offers a compelling glimpse into the transformative potential of AI in the voice and speech sectors.
