ElevenLabs – Reinventing Audio with AI

If Synthesia is rewriting the rules of video, ElevenLabs is doing pretty much the same for audio.

Founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, the company started with a simple but ambitious goal: make AI voices sound natural. What began as dubbing has grown into a full audio platform backed by top investors including a16z, Sequoia, and Concept Ventures.

In just 20 months, ElevenLabs hit $100m ARR and reached a $6.6bn valuation after a secondary share sale in September — and they’re not slowing down.

Recently, they’ve launched:

• Eleven Music — a generative music model that can create studio-grade tracks from a text prompt, with licensing agreements to keep rights holders on board.

• Upgraded voices — more expressive, nuanced, and developer-friendly via their v3 API.

• Productions — a service layer to polish AI audio into professional-grade content.

The big picture? ElevenLabs isn’t just making better text-to-speech. They’re building the future of how we experience audio across languages, music, podcasts, gaming, and beyond.

And with NVIDIA now making a strategic investment, the signal is clear: AI audio isn’t just growing — it’s about to scale, fast. As CEO Mati Staniszewski put it, “We need strategic partners… they’re coming in with more than capital. They’re bringing inside-out knowledge of GPUs”. With that backing, ElevenLabs is positioned not only as a European success story, but as one of the companies defining the global future of sound.