Artificial intelligence (AI) startup ElevenLabs has successfully raised US$80 million in its latest round of financing, which has rocketed its valuation to US$1.1 billion, officially joining the ranks of unicorns. ElevenLabs announced on Monday (January 22) that the company received US$80 million in Series B financing, led by American private venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and Sequoia Capital and other companies also participated in the financing.
ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 and is headquartered in London, England. It focuses on developing AI speech models and tools for creating synthetic speech in different languages, accents and emotions. It currently supports 29 languages including English, Russian and French.
PitchBook data shows ElevenLabs has grown by leaps and bounds from its $100 million valuation around 2023, reflecting a surge in expectations for the adoption of AI voice by companies as diverse as gaming giants and movie studios.
Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs, said that the latest round of financing has brought the company's valuation to US$1.1 billion. The company currently has about 40 telecommuting employees distributed around the world, and plans to expand the team to 100 people by the end of the year.
Staniszewski said that with the new funding, the company plans to expand from its early applications in audiobooks and video games into media production, such as dubbing movies or creating full-fledged AI actors, while ensuring the safe deployment of AI technology.
According to the official website, ElevenLabs’ customers are not only individual content creators, but also companies such as Storytel, Paradox Interactive and the Washington Post. Even US campaign staff are using its products to reach foreign language voters.
In recent years, technology industry investors have invested heavily in startups developing AI tools, and a series of products have sprung up. This has also raised concerns that AI will be used for fraud, deep fakes, etc. ElevenLabs has previously said that some people are using its technology for "malicious purposes."
Staniszewski claimed that ElevenLabs attaches great importance to the transparency of AI content. There will be more and more such content in the future. The key is to ensure that people realize that this is AI content. We strongly support the ability to detect and track AI-generated content. Therefore, ElevenLabs developed tools such as AISpeechClassifier to help identify synthetic audio.
At the same time, ElevenLabs faces fierce competition in the field of AI voice from a series of technology companies such as OpenAI. ChatGPT, a subsidiary of OpenAI, launched a text-to-speech product last year, directly competing with ElevenLabs.
In addition to announcing the funding, ElevenLabs also launched a new service that allows certain users to generate their own AI voices, upload them to the market-oriented "VoiceLibrary", and then share the revenue when customers use it.
Staniszewski said that the advantage of ElevenLabs is that it not only focuses on technology research and development, but also focuses on building workflows to provide users with comprehensive solutions.