ElevenLabs

Piotr Dąbkowski and Mati Staniszewski met as teenagers at Copernicus Bilingual High School in Warsaw, Poland. Both went on to elite technical careers: Dąbkowski studied at Oxford and Cambridge, publishing his AI-based image detection thesis at NeurIPS before joining Google as a machine learning engineer; Staniszewski studied mathematics at Imperial College London, then worked at BlackRock and Palantir as a deployment strategist. Their inspiration for ElevenLabs reportedly came from watching badly dubbed American films growing up in Poland — the original performances were stripped of all emotional nuance. In April 2022, they co-founded ElevenLabs with a single mission: make content accessible in every language, in every voice, in every sound.

ElevenLabs spent twelve months in stealth, building from research principles rather than rushing to ship. They launched publicly in January 2023 and attracted over one million registered users within five months. The product's differentiation was immediately apparent: unlike robotic text-to-speech systems from Apple and Amazon, ElevenLabs' models captured natural pauses, laughter, and conversational fillers. The company knew it was on the right track when its model began adding "umms" naturally — the opposite of what users expected from AI. By late 2023, 60% of Fortune 500 companies had employees using the platform.

ElevenLabs raised $80 million in a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz in January 2024, achieving a $1.1 billion valuation — unicorn status — less than two years after founding. In December 2024, the company was selected for the Disney Accelerator programme, exploring applications for high-quality AI dubbing in entertainment. By late 2024, ElevenLabs had reached $90 million in ARR, up from $25 million earlier in the year — a 260% year-on-year increase. The platform supported 29 languages with the Multilingual v2 model, with Flash v2.5 generating speech in under 75 milliseconds for real-time applications.

ElevenLabs raised $180 million in a Series C in January 2025, co-led by a16z and ICONIQ Growth, valuing the company at $3.3 billion. By September 2025 it had reached $200 million ARR. The company launched Eleven Music in August 2025 — an AI music generator produced in collaboration with record labels and cleared for commercial use. The platform supported 70+ languages and was used by enterprises, creators, and developers in more than a dozen global offices. Staniszewski joined the board of Klarna in 2025.

ElevenLabs raised $500 million in a Series D in February 2026, led by Sequoia Capital with Andrew Reed joining the board. Andreessen Horowitz quadrupled its investment; ICONIQ tripled its stake. The round valued the company at $11 billion. By 2026, ElevenLabs's Conversational AI platform — voice agents capable of handling customer service calls with human-indistinguishable natural speech — had begun replacing human call centre staff across financial services and healthcare. ARR had exceeded $500 million. The name ElevenLabs derives from November 11th, Poland's National Independence Day — the company's two founders had turned their country's independence day into one of Europe's most valuable AI companies.