ElevenLabs, a company that builds AI-powered solutions to generate and modify synthetic voices, revealed today that it secured an $80 million Series B funding round co-led by notable investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and businessman Daniel Gross.
The round, which also saw contributions from Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, SV Angel, BroadLight Capital and Credo Ventures, increases ElevenLabs’ total funding to $101 million and boosts the company’s valuation to over $1 billion (from ~$100 million last June). CEO Mati Staniszewski says the new money will be invested in product development, growing ElevenLabs’ infrastructure and staff, AI research and “improving safety standards to ensure ethical and responsible use of AI technology.
Staniszewski, the CEO of ElevenLabs, said in an email interview with TechCrunch that the new funding would help ElevenLabs secure its place as the world’s top voice AI company in terms of research and product delivery.
ElevenLabs was co-founded in 2022 by Staniszewski, who used to work as a deployment strategist at Palantir, and Piotr Dabkowski, a former machine learning engineer at Google. They both came from Poland and had a common motivation to develop voice cloning tools: the bad quality of dubbing in American movies. They believed AI could improve it.
ElevenLabs is now widely recognized for its web-based speech generation app that can produce realistic voices with customizable features such as intonation, emotion, cadence and other vocal attributes. Users can type text and get a recording of that text spoken by one of several preset voices for free. Premium customers can upload voice samples to create new styles using ElevenLabs’ voice cloning.
ElevenLabs is focusing on developing its speech-generating technology to produce audiobooks and dub films and TV shows, as well as to create character voices for games and marketing campaigns.
The company launched a “speech to speech” tool last year that tries to keep a speaker’s voice, prosody and intonation while automatically eliminating background noise, and — for movies and TV shows — translates and aligns speech with the original content. In the next few weeks, ElevenLabs plans to release a new dubbing studio workflow with tools to create and edit transcripts and translations and a subscription-based mobile app that reads webpages and text using ElevenLabs voices.
ElevenLabs’ breakthroughs have attracted customers from Paradox Interactive, the game developer behind Cities: Skylines 2 and Stellaris, and The Washington Post — as well as other publishing, media and entertainment companies. Staniszewski says that ElevenLab users have created more than 100 years of audio and that the platform is being used by employees at 41% of Fortune 500 companies.
However, the publicity has not been all good.
The notorious message board 4chan, known for its conspiratorial content, used ElevenLabs’ tools to spread hateful messages impersonating celebrities like actress Emma Watson. The Verge’s James Vincent was able to use ElevenLabs to maliciously clone voices in a matter of seconds, producing samples with everything from violent threats to racist and transphobic comments. And at Vox, reporter Joseph Cox reported generating a clone convincing enough to trick a bank’s authentication system.
As a result, ElevenLabs has tried to remove users who repeatedly break its terms of service, which forbids abuse, and launched a tool to identify speech created by its platform. This year, ElevenLabs intends to enhance the detection tool to mark audio from other voice-generating AI models and collaborate with unnamed “distribution players” to make the tool accessible on third-party platforms, Staniszewski says.
ElevenLabs has also received backlash from voice actors who allege that the company uses samples of their voices without their permission — samples that could be used to endorse content they don’t support or spread false and misleading information. In a recent Vice article, victims describe how ElevenLabs was used in harassment campaigns against them, in one case to reveal an actor’s private information — their home address — using a cloned voice.
Another issue is the existential threat platforms like ElevenLabs pose to the voice acting industry.
Motherboard reports how voice actors are increasingly being pressured to give up rights to their voices so that clients can use AI to create synthetic versions that could eventually replace them — sometimes without adequate compensation. The concern is that voice work — especially low-cost, entry-level work — will eventually be substituted by AI-generated vocals, and that actors will have no options.
Some platforms are trying to find a balance. Earlier this month, Replica Studios, an ElevenLabs rival, signed a deal with SAG-AFTRA to create and license digital copies of the media artist union members’ voices. In a press release, the organizations said that the deal established “fair” and “ethical” terms and conditions to ensure performer consent — and negotiating terms for uses of digital voice doubles in new works.
However, this didn’t satisfy some voice actors, including SAG-AFTRA’s own members.
ElevenLabs’ solution is a marketplace for voices. Currently in alpha and set to become more widely available in the next several weeks, the marketplace enables users to create a voice, verify and share it. When others use a voice, the original creators receive compensation, Staniszewski says.
“Users always maintain control over their voice’s availability and compensation terms,” he added. “The marketplace is designed as a step towards aligning AI advancements with established industry practices, while also bringing a diverse set of voices to ElevenLabs’ platform.”
Voice actors may have a problem with the fact that ElevenLabs isn’t paying in cash, though — at least not for now. The current setup has creators receiving credit toward ElevenLabs’ premium services (which some may find ironic, I’d guess).
Maybe that’ll change in the future as ElevenLabs — which is now among the best-funded synthetic voice startups — tries to fend off upstart competition like Papercup, Deepdub, ElevenLabs, Acapela, Respeecher and Voice.ai as well as Big Tech incumbents such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. In any case, ElevenLabs, which plans to increase its headcount from 40 people to 100 by the end of the year, intends on staying around — and making waves — in the fast-growing synthetic voice market