ElevenLabs has raised $500 million in fresh funding, catapulting the London-based startup to an $11 billion valuation and cementing its place among Europe’s most valuable artificial intelligence companies.
The Series D round, announced recentlty, was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. It marks a stunning acceleration for the firm, which was valued at just $3.3 billion in January 2025.
A tender offer late last year had already pushed its worth to $6.6 billion. Now, at $11 billion, ElevenLabs has more than tripled its valuation in under 13 months.
Founded in 2022 by Polish engineers Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, the company built its reputation on eerily human sounding synthetic voices. But its ambitions have shifted toward enterprise. Its flagship product, ElevenAgents, aims to power customer service chats, sales calls, and internal workflows with AI voices that handle interruptions, shift tone, and respond with near zero delay, something most voice assistants still struggle with.
The timing isn’t accidental. Demand for natural sounding conversational AI is climbing fast across banking, telecoms, and e-commerce. ElevenLabs says it generated more than $330 million in annual recurring revenue last year, with clients including Deutsche Telekom, Square, and Revolut. That kind of traction caught investor attention.
“Voice is the next interface,” said one person familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named. “We’re moving past chatbots that sound like robots reading a script. The question is whether the tech can scale without tripping over ethics.”
And that’s the rub. Voice cloning carries real risks. Deepfake audio has already been used in scams and misinformation campaigns. ElevenLabs itself faced backlash in 2023 after users cloned celebrities’ voices without consent. The company tightened safeguards afterward, but regulators in Europe and the US are watching closely as the sector grows.
Competition is heating up too. Tech giants like Google and Microsoft are baking advanced speech models into their cloud platforms. Startups like Resemble AI and Murf target creators with simpler voice tools. ElevenLabs is betting that enterprises will pay a premium for a unified platform that handles everything from dubbing to real time conversation.
With the new capital, the company plans to expand teams in Asia and Latin America and push research into what it calls “audio general intelligence”, AI that understands and generates sound the way large language models handle text. An eventual IPO is on the roadmap, though executives aren’t giving timelines.
