{"id":376485,"date":"2026-01-18T06:30:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T06:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/376485\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T06:30:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T06:30:13","slug":"ai-voice-start-up-elevenlabs-in-funding-talks-at-11bn-valuation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/376485\/","title":{"rendered":"AI voice start-up ElevenLabs in funding talks at $11bn valuation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stay informed with free updates<\/p>\n

Simply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n

ElevenLabs is in talks for new funding that would almost double its valuation to $11bn within months and transform it into the UK\u2019s most valuable AI start-up.<\/p>\n

The AI voice-generator company is seeking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, according to people familiar with the matter. The discussions come just four months after a secondary share sale, which valued it at $6.6bn. <\/p>\n

The people added that the talks were at an early stage and could still change. <\/p>\n

ElevenLabs was co-founded in London by Polish entrepreneurs Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski in 2022 and has been backed by venture capital investors<\/a>, including Sequoia, Iconiq and Andreessen Horowitz. <\/p>\n

Its latest funding talks could propel it to become the UK\u2019s most highly valued AI start-up. London-based autonomous driving company Wayve was in talks in October to raise up to $2bn of new funding<\/a> at a valuation of about $8bn, before taking the new money into account. Nscale, the Nvidia-backed cloud computing start-up, was valued at about $3bn in September. <\/p>\n

It would also make ElevenLabs one of Europe\u2019s most valuable AI start-ups, taking it close to French group Mistral, one of the few European companies building \u201cfrontier\u201d AI models, which was valued at almost $12bn<\/a> in September. <\/p>\n

ElevenLabs uses AI to create realistic voices and has been adopted in areas such as customer service, turning text into speech and dubbing languages. The group has grown quickly and last year generated $330mn in annual recurring revenue, a metric popular with fast-growing start-ups.<\/p>\n

It has headquarters in both London and New York, and offices in other cities such as Warsaw, Bengaluru and Tokyo. It has also incorporated in the US to make it easier to access American venture funding<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"Lovable,<\/a><\/p>\n

ElevenLabs had previously raised $180mn of funding in January 2025 at a $3.3bn valuation. In September, it doubled its value in a deal that allowed employees to offload $100mn worth of stock at a $6.6bn valuation. At the time, the company said its annual recurring revenue had reached $200mn.<\/p>\n

The fundraising comes as AI start-ups have continued to attract surging investor interest across the world. But European AI companies<\/a> remain far behind US groups in terms of both fundraising and commercialisation. <\/p>\n

OpenAI is one of the most valuable private tech companies in the world with a $500bn valuation. The US group is in discussions with investors about a new funding round that could raise as much as $80bn and value it at more than $800bn, according to multiple people with knowledge of the talks.<\/p>\n

ElevenLabs has also received investment from NEA, Smash Capital and FT Ventures, the corporate venture arm of the FT. <\/p>\n

ElevenLabs did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-376485","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}