ElevenLabs triples valuation to $11B in one year after $500M round led by Sequoia, eyes IPO

ElevenLabs just closed a $500 million funding round that values the company at $11 billion, a sharp jump from the $3.3 billion price valuation a year ago. The raise lands as the three-year-old startup lines up a path toward a public offering.

The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq, as well as new investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital, and Bond. Cofounder and CEO Mati Staniszewski said Nvidia took a stake in September, adding another major name to the cap table.

“With the new funding, ElevenLabs is doubling down on ElevenAgents, its enterprise platform for voice and conversational AI, to support customer experience, sales and marketing, and internal workflows with interactive voice agents,” ElevenLabs said in a blog post.

ElevenLabs started in 2022 as a text-to-speech company and moved quickly beyond that initial focus. Its products now cover speech-to-text, sound effects, dubbing, music generation, and conversational audio. The company sells consumer tools for creators, enterprise integrations, and custom deployments across industries such as healthcare. Clients include Cisco, publishers such as The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and gaming studios like Paradox and Cloud Imperium Games.

“We started by building a voice that could sound human – and we did. Today we are building foundational models across the full audio stack – text to speech, transcription, music, dubbing and conversational models with a world-leading research team. And we take the models even further by optimizing them for the best product experiences that we believe will redefine the benchmarks,” said Piotr Dabkowski, Co-Founder of ElevenLabs.

Staniszewski says the next phase goes beyond voice alone. “This funding helps us go beyond voice alone to transform how we interact with technology altogether,” he said, adding that ElevenLabs is building tools that let agents talk, type, and take action. The company plans to provide deeper support for creators and broader use within large organizations.

From Text-to-Speech to $11B: AI Voice Startup ElevenLabs Raises $500M as It Prepares for an IPO

Enterprise traction has driven the numbers. ElevenLabs said it closed out 2025 with more than $330 million in annual recurring revenue, supported by customers such as Deutsche Telekom and Revolut. Its voice infrastructure is used by tech giants including Meta and Salesforce, and its audio platform has been adopted by brands such as Time.

The company runs with a lean team of roughly 50 remote employees spread across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Leadership expects headcount to double by the end of the year as it pushes further into international markets, with offices already established across Europe, Brazil, Mexico, India, South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

The funding lands in a year that reshaped the AI investment landscape. European AI startups raised a record $21.6 billion in 2025, according to Dealroom. Big rounds went to French model builder Mistral, UK infrastructure firm Nscale, German defense tech startup Helsing, and London-based avatar company Synthesia.

Across the Atlantic, U.S. AI startups pulled in $164.6 billion last year, fueled by massive funding rounds for OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. In January, CNBC reported that Amazon could invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI.

For ElevenLabs, the message is clear. Investor appetite for AI voice has shifted from experimentation to scale, and the company now sits among Europe’s most valuable startups. With revenue climbing, blue-chip customers on board, and IPO plans openly discussed, ElevenLabs is positioning itself as a long-term platform company rather than a single-feature tool.