ElevenLabs\u2019 computer voices are so convincing they could fool your mother. That\u2019s both a blessing\u2014its 30 Under 30 alumni founders are now both billionaires\u2014and a curse for the four-year-old company. <\/p>\n
Dubbed films in Poland are horrible. A lone lektor delivers all the dialogue in an enervated Slavic monotone. There is no cast. No variation between speakers. Young audiences hate it. \u201cAsk any Polish person and they will tell you it\u2019s terrible,\u201d says Mateusz Staniszewski, the cofounder of AI speech outfit ElevenLabs. \u201cI guess it was a communist thing that stuck as a cheap way to produce content.\u201d <\/p>\n
While working at Palantir, Staniszewski teamed up with high school friend and Google engineer Piotr Dabkowski to experiment with artificial intelligence. The pair realized that one project, a particularly promising AI public speaking coach, could solve the uniquely Polish horror of Leonardo DiCaprio or Scarlett Johansson being drowned out by a lektor \u201cstar\u201d like Maciej Gudowski. <\/p>\n
The pair pooled their savings and by May 2022 had quit their jobs to work full-time on ElevenLabs. Out of the gate, their new AI text-to-speech generator was leagues better than the robotic voices of Apple\u2019s Siri and Amazon\u2019s Alexa. ElevenLabs\u2019 AI voices were capable of happiness, excitement, even laughter. <\/p>\n
In January 2023 ElevenLabs launched its first model. It could take any piece of text and use AI to read it aloud in any voice\u2014including a clone of your own (or, worryingly, someone else\u2019s). There was immediate demand. Authors could instantly spawn audiobooks with the software (pro rates now start from $99 a month for higher quality and more time). YouTube creators used ElevenLabs to translate their videos into other languages (its models can now speak in 29). The Warsaw- and London-based startup landed deals with lang\u00aduage learning and meditation apps; then media companies like HarperCollins and Germany\u2019s Bertelsmann jumped in. \u201cIt was obvious that this was the best model and everyone was picking it off the shelf,\u201d says investor Jennifer Li of Andreessen Horowitz, which co-led a $19 million round in May 2023. A year later, the cofounders were honored as part of Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe. <\/p>\n
Others, though, found more unnerving uses: AI soundalikes of public figures such as President Trump crassly narrating video game duels, actress Emma Watson reading Mein Kampf and podcaster Joe Rogan touting scams quickly went viral. Worse, fraudsters began using AI cloning tools to impersonate loved ones\u2019 voices and steal millions in sophisticated deepfake swindles. <\/p>\n
None of it stopped venture capitalists from pouring in money. ElevenLabs has raised more than $300 million in all, soaring to a $6.6 billion valuation in October to become one of Europe\u2019s most valuable startups. Staniszewski, 30, who acts as CEO (the firm has no traditional titles), and research head Dabkowski, 30, are now both billionaires, worth just over $1 billion each, per Forbes estimates. <\/p>\n
Around half of ElevenLabs\u2019 $193 million in trailing 12-month revenue comes from corporates like Cisco, Twilio and Swiss recruitment agency Adecco, which use its tech to field customer service calls or interview job seekers. Epic Games uses it to voice characters in Fortnite, including a chat with Darth Vader (with the consent of James Earl Jones\u2019 estate). The other half of its revenue comes from the YouTubers, podcasters and authors who were early adopters. \u201cWhen you talk to them, it\u2019s mind-blowing how good they are,\u201d says Gartner analyst Tom Coshow. Unlike most AI firms, too, ElevenLabs is profitable, netting an estimated $116 million in the last 12 months (a 60% margin). <\/p>\n
It\u2019s now competing against giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and OpenAI to become the de facto voice of AI. It\u2019s not a new space: Tech companies started spinning up products to listen, transcribe and generate speech around a decade ago. While it\u2019s somewhat of a sideline for Microsoft, Satya Nadella was willing to shell out $20 billion to buy Nasdaq-listed voice transcription service Nuance in March 2022. OpenAI launched its own voice tool, which can feed human conversations into ChatGPT, in October 2024. <\/p>\n
It Goes to 11 | ElevenLabs\u2019 numero\u00adphile cofounders, Mati Staniszewski (left) and Piotr Dabkowski (right), love the number 11, especially the \u201crule of 11\u201d divisibility trick. Their next goal? An $11 billion valuation, naturally.<\/p>\n
Cody Pickens for Forbes<\/p>\n
But ElevenLabs\u2019 300-person team isn\u2019t playing catch-up. Its models are so good that it\u2019s able to get away with charging up to three times as much as these American rivals. Its library of 10,000 uncannily human-sounding voices is the largest by far and now includes A-listers Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey. It\u2019s also more reliable. Data training startup Labelbox tested six of the top voice models with a reading quiz and found that ElevenLabs made half as many errors as its closest competitor, OpenAI. \u201cWe are one of the very few companies that are ahead of OpenAI\u2014not only on speech, but speech-to-text and music. That\u2019s hard,\u201d Staniszewski says. ElevenLabs\u2019 recipe is simple. A tight cadre of machine learning researchers, with obsessive focus on one narrow problem, and a tight budget (the cofounders fronted the first $100,000 training run) drove model breakthroughs. \u201cHaving a ton of compute can be a curse because you don\u2019t think how to solve it in a smart way,\u201d Dabkowski says. <\/p>\n
But a lawsuit from a pair of audiobook narrators hints at another ingredient. Karissa Vacker and Mark Boyett allege that ElevenLabs used thousands of copyright-protected audiobooks to train its models. They claim so many of their books were scraped that clones of their voices ended up as default options on ElevenLabs. The case, in which ElevenLabs denied wrongdoing, was settled out of court in November. (Vacker and Boyett did not respond to a comment request; ElevenLabs declined further comment.) <\/p>\n
Maturity is setting in. The company finally drew up a list of \u201cno go\u201d voices (mostly politicians and celebrities) after an ElevenLabs-made clone of Joe Biden\u2019s voice was used to discourage voting in a robocall campaign around the 2024 Democratic primary. ElevenLabs now has seven full-time human moderators (plus AI, natch) scouring its clips for misuse. Newly cloned voices need to pass a consent check, and the company offers a free deepfake detector. <\/p>\n
Staniszewski and Dabkowski have big plans beyond voice. Both cash-strapped creators and budget-conscious media companies wanted royalty-free background music, so they delivered an AI music generator in August. Don\u2019t have time to shoot a video? ElevenLabs will have AI avatars to front Sora-style videos next year. Their boldest bet is that they can translate their expertise to provide a single hub for clients to manage all their AI tools. \u201cWe are building a platform that allows you to create voice agents and deploy them smoothly,\u201d Staniszewski says. <\/p>\n
Of course, that puts ElevenLabs on a collision course with a gaggle of other startups hoping to do the same thing. It helps that it\u2019s been profitable since its earliest days, but its startup competitors are richly funded, and the tech giants have virtually unlimited resources. Still, it must innovate. Voice models will soon be commoditized. When other models catch up, fickle customers that already balk at ElevenLabs\u2019 pricing will likely switch. <\/p>\n
As it broadens beyond voices to more computationally intensive music and video, ElevenLabs needs to expand its own GPU farms to stay in the race. It has already spent $50 million on a data center project in Oregon. \u201cIf we are to build the generational company in AI, you need to build scale, and we are building,\u201d Staniszewski says. <\/p>\n
Back in Poland, the aging corps of lektors are still in business, for now. Dabkowski hasn\u2019t forgotten ElevenLabs\u2019 original pitch, boasting that his next model will translate and voice an entire movie in one shot. \u201cWe never give up on our missions,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
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