Eleven Labs

Market position

Described by FNEX as a leading AI audio and voice technology company; secondary-market and pre-IPO platforms track it alongside other large private AI companies. Its reported $11 billion post-money valuation in February 2026 represents more than a 10x increase from the $1.1 billion unicorn valuation reached in January 2024. Sources note that when the company was founded the voice AI market attracted little venture interest despite text-to-speech offerings from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

Positions on the realism of generated speech — contextual interpretation of text to convey emotion and appropriate pacing rather than robotic output — and on cross-language dubbing that preserves the original speaker's voice, tone and emotion while matching the original visual editing. It also released what it described as a first-of-its-kind AI Speech Classifier for detecting audio generated with its own models, and offers a breadth of audio modalities (speech, speech-to-text, sound effects, music, agents) in one platform.

Technology

Deep learning-based speech synthesis. The models are described as interpreting the context of input text to adjust intonation and pacing and to detect sentiment such as anger, sadness, happiness or alarm, producing more human-like inflection. Capabilities span text-to-speech, speech-to-text (Scribe v2 Realtime), sound effects, dubbing in more than 70 languages, music generation (Eleven Music), conversational voice agents and agent workflows. Voice cloning (VoiceLab) creates synthetic voices from short audio snippets, and a Voice Library distributes community-created voice profiles. An AI Speech Classifier, released 20 June 2023 and accessible via API, identifies whether audio originated from the company's models. The company said it was in the process of patenting its context-interpretation technology.

Go-to-market

Self-serve browser-based product with free and paid tiers plus an API for developers, combined with enterprise sales and strategic corporate investors that are also customers or partners (e.g., Deutsche Telekom, Salesforce). Early customer acquisition included cold outreach to YouTube creators. A community Voice Library and Voice Marketplace support distribution of voices created by users.

Enterprises, developers and content creators. Named enterprise customers include Meta, Salesforce, Epic Games, Deutsche Telekom, Revolut, Klarna, MasterClass, Duolingo and the Ukrainian Government. Early go-to-market focused on YouTube and other online creators seeking to reach audiences in other languages.

Geography

Legally incorporated in the United States, based in London with offices in New York City, Warsaw and San Francisco; the New York headquarters is on Madison Avenue. Public.com and FNEX list the headquarters as New York, NY. The company was reported in 2025 to be planning new hubs in Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico. Dubbing is offered in more than 70 languages.

History

Founded in 2022. In January 2023 the founders disclosed a $2 million pre-seed round led primarily by Credo Ventures with Concept Ventures participating (FNEX also lists Peter Czaban), and the company publicly released its beta platform that month. A $19 million Series A at roughly a $100 million valuation followed in 2023 (Wikipedia dates the round to June 2023; FNEX to May 2023), co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, with SV Angel, Mike Krieger, Brendan Iribe, Mustafa Suleyman and Tim O'Reilly participating; Andreessen Horowitz joined the board. On 22 January 2024 the company raised $80 million in Series B at a $1.1 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Friedman, Gross and Sequoia Capital, alongside new products including a Voice Marketplace, AI Dubbing Studio and mobile app. On 30 January 2025 it announced a $180 million Series C at a $3.3 billion valuation co-led by a16z and ICONIQ Growth, with NEA, World Innovation Lab, Valor, Endeavor Catalyst Fund, Lunate and strategic investors Deutsche Telekom, LG Technology Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, NTT DOCOMO Ventures and RingCentral Ventures. In September 2025 it opened an employee tender offer at a $6.6 billion valuation for staff with at least one year of tenure (reported at about $100 million). On 4 February 2026 it announced a $500 million Series D at an $11 billion valuation led by Sequoia Capital, with a16z, ICONIQ, Lightspeed, BOND, Evantic Capital, BroadLight and Smash Capital; a third close in May 2026 added BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, Schroders, NVIDIA (NVentures), Salesforce, Deutsche Telekom and Santander, bringing total funding above $850 million. In March 2026 the company pledged $1 billion in free restoration voice technology for 1 million people living with permanent voice loss. On 2 April 2026 an undisclosed buyer acquired an unknown minority stake in Eleven Labs Inc. from Swedish investment company Flat Capital AB.

Risks & controversies

Ahead of the January 2024 New Hampshire Democratic primary, AI-generated robocalls impersonating Joe Biden urged residents not to vote; the New Hampshire attorney general's office investigated and linked the incident to a Texas-based company, with audio experts concluding the call was made using ElevenLabs technology. The CEO said the company was dedicated to preventing misuse of audio AI tools but did not comment on the specific incident. More broadly, voice cloning from short audio samples creates impersonation risk. Public.com's funding-history and company-profile data for "Eleven Labs" conflicts with other sources (it lists a 2016 founding date and Series D amounts of $9M, $15M and $467M), so figures from that source are uncertain. FNEX materials are published by a broker-dealer marketing a fund with exposure to the company and describe their figures as approximate.