ElevenLabs

Overview

ElevenLabs is an AI voice company founded in London in 2022 by CEO Mati Staniszewski, a former Palantir deployment strategist, and CTO Piotr Dabkowski, a former Google machine learning engineer — both originally from Poland (TechCrunch). What began as a text-to-speech tool has become one of the most valuable private AI companies in the world: valued at over $1 billion in January 2024, at $11 billion after a $500 million-plus Series D announced in February 2026, and at $22 billion in a $300 million employee tender offer completed on September 30, 2026 (CNA (Reuters); Music Business Worldwide). Its story is inseparable from two counterweights: a deliberate strategy of licensed expansion — most visibly into AI music — and an ongoing, independently documented record of voice-cloning misuse.

From dubbing inspiration to unicorn

Staniszewski has said he and Dabkowski were inspired to build voice-cloning tools by poorly dubbed American films — AI, they thought, could do better (TechCrunch). The company’s browser-based speech generation app, with adjustable toggles for intonation, emotion and cadence, won early customers including game developer Paradox Interactive and The Washington Post, and the company claimed users had generated the equivalent of more than 100 years of audio by early 2024 (TechCrunch). The January 2024 Series B — $80 million co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and entrepreneur Daniel Gross, with Sequoia Capital participating — brought total funding to $101 million and a valuation over $1 billion, up from roughly $100 million the previous June (TechCrunch; The Hindu).

The enterprise pivot and the $22 billion tender

By 2026 the company’s growth engine had shifted decisively to conversational voice agents. Its ElevenAgents platform was handling more than 15 million conversations each week — triple the February level — doing tasks like processing refunds, renewing insurance policies and booking appointments, with enterprise customers accounting for 55 percent of revenue (Music Business Worldwide; CNA (Reuters)). The company said it had crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue by May 2026, up from $350 million at the end of 2025 (Music Business Worldwide).

The September 30, 2026 tender offer valued the company at $22 billion — double its February valuation — and was led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price, with new investors including Goldman Sachs, Singapore’s GIC, EQT and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan joining existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed and ICONIQ (CNA (Reuters); Music Business Worldwide). It was the company’s third employee tender since September 2025, and — as with all tenders — it provided liquidity to employees and existing shareholders rather than raising new capital for the company (Music Business Worldwide).

The licensed-music strategy

ElevenLabs entered AI song generation in August 2025 with what is now ElevenMusic — and did so with licensing agreements already in place from Merlin, the indie-label digital licensing body, and the music publisher Kobalt (Music Business Worldwide). That sequencing set it apart from rivals Suno and Udio, which launched without such deals and were subsequently sued for copyright infringement by the major record companies (Music Business Worldwide). ElevenLabs added a deal with Believe and, on September 10, 2026, signed a multi-year agreement with Universal Music Group — described by both firms as its first with a major record company — under which it will build a fan platform for remixes, mashups and “new track interpretations,” kept separate from the ElevenMusic app and music API (Music Business Worldwide). The contrast with its rivals is now a valuation story too: at $22 billion, ElevenLabs is worth more than four times Suno, which reached a $5.4 billion valuation in June while remaining a defendant in copyright suits brought by Universal and Sony (Music Business Worldwide).

The misuse record

The company’s technology has a documented abuse history that independent sources have tracked since its earliest days. In 2023, users of the message board 4chan used ElevenLabs’ tools to post hateful messages mimicking celebrities including actress Emma Watson; a Verge reporter demonstrated cloning voices in seconds to produce threats and racist remarks; and a Vice reporter generated a clone convincing enough to fool a bank’s authentication system (TechCrunch; The Hindu). Voice actors have said the company used samples of their voices without consent for content they did not endorse (TechCrunch).

In March 2025, Consumer Reports published an assessment of six voice-cloning products and found that a majority — including ElevenLabs — had no meaningful safeguards against misuse: researchers easily created voice clones from publicly available audio, and four products, ElevenLabs among them, required only that users check a box attesting they had the legal right to clone the voice, with no technical mechanism to verify the speaker’s consent or limit cloning to the user’s own voice (Consumer Reports). The organization called on companies to adopt consent verification, customer identity checks, audio watermarking and detection tools (Consumer Reports). The company, for its part, has said it enforces its terms of service against abusers and has built a speech-classification tool to detect audio created with its platform (TechCrunch).

What this profile does not claim

• This profile does not assert a Series C round between the 2024 Series B and the 2026 Series D; no such round could be verified from a fully-read source, so only the verified valuation steps are stated.
• Reported 2026 litigation (a class action under Illinois’ biometric privacy law) and U.S. Senate inquiries into the company’s safeguards were seen only in lower-tier summaries and were not independently verified — neither is asserted as fact.
• Employee counts, revenue figures and enterprise-adoption metrics are company-reported via press coverage and are presented as reported, not as independently audited facts.
• The profile does not take a position on whether ElevenLabs’ safeguards are currently adequate; it reports the documented misuse incidents, the Consumer Reports findings, and the company’s stated responses.
• This profile covers the London-founded AI voice company ElevenLabs; it makes no claims about similarly named entities.