Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski’s ElevenLabs is everywhere. Matthew McConaughey uses ElevenLabs to power the Spanish-language version of his personal newsletter. Masterclass uses ElevenLabs to give A.I. versions of its instructors a voice. Even the Ukrainian government uses ElevenLabs to add audio interfaces to public services. Silicon Valley, of course, has also taken notice of the venture’s fast-spreading influence. Today (Feb. 4), Staniszewski and Dabkowski announced that their venture has raised $500 million in a Series D round, led by Sequoia, with big-name backers like Andreessen Horowitz, Iconic, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital and BOND. The round gives ElevenLabs a valuation of $11 billion, a more than threefold increase from the $3.3 billion figure it received last year, and brings its total funding to $781 million.
The Palantir (Staniszewski) and Google (Dabkowski) alums launched the company in 2022 with a focus on text-to-speech A.I. models and have since expanded to include features such as conversational technology, dubbing and sound effects. Staniszewski and Dabkowski are among the most dominant players in A.I. today, and ElevenLabs is the indisputable authority in A.I. voice generation—a submarket of the A.I. industry expected to balloon from $4.1 billion in 2025 to $20.7 billion by 2031.
ElevenLabs closed 2025 with more than $330 million in annual recurring revenue—10 percent above last year’s $300 million goal. With fresh funding in hand, Staniszewski and Dabkowski will bolster ElevenLabs’ roster of conversational A.I. agents, making the assistants (used by the likes of Square and Revolut) faster, more interactive, and more expressive. Duolingo, Nvidia and Time Magazine use ElevenLabs’ ElevenCreative platform to generate and localize audio across more than 70 languages. Meta, Epic Games, Salesforce and Harvey use ElevenLabs’ voice infrastructure to enable developers to build products and experiences.
Enterprise isn’t the venture’s only source of revenue. In a surprising turn for an industry riddled with concerns about A.I. creep, Hollywood has shown growing interest in ElevenLabs’ Iconic Voice Marketplace, a two-sided platform that facilitates authorized use of A.I.-generated versions of celebrity voices. McConaughey (who has an equity stake in the company) and Michael Caine were among the first actors to license their voices to ElevenLabs and have become vocal proponents of the marketplace, which now includes the voices of Maya Angelou, Alan Turing, Liza Minelli and Art Garfunkel.
Staniszewski and Dabkowski aren’t just entering new industries; they are expanding ElevenLabs into new locations beyond their headquarters in London and New York. To maintain its lead over rivals like Hume, WaveForms and PlayAI—the latter two were snapped up by Meta last year—ElevenLabs is eyeing offices in Europe, Asia, Australia and South America, and plans to eventually go public. Last year, Staniszewski said ElevenLabs hopes to be IPO-ready in the next five years,
“When we started ElevenLabs, we couldn’t have imagined the scale and impact we’ve reached today, with an incredible team doing the best work of their lives,” Staniszewski, who also serves as CEO of ElevenLabs, said in a statement. “Yet we stay hungry, knowing how early this space is, as we build toward IPO and beyond.”
Observer
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