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ElevenLabs , one of the more popular inauguration work in the field of battle of AI audio , said Thursday that it has raised a Series C circle of $ 180 million , prize the company at $ 3.3 billion post - money . a16z and ICONIQ Growth are co - leading the investment funds .
rumour of the fundraise werefirst reported by TechCrunch . The last numbers confirm some but not all of the details we previously reported ( specifically , the overall size of the cycle is small than we had heard ; the evaluation and lead investors are the same ) .
The financing will be used to continue construct out ElevenLabs ’ audio tool and for occupation development .
Mati Staniszewski , the CEO who co - founded the fellowship with childhood friend Piotr Dabkowski , say in an consultation that the startup is focusing its research on building audio AI models that are more expressive and have more control condition . Staniszewski add that the fellowship is also focusing on “ omni - models ” : combine text - base exemplar with its audio recording model for multimodal interaction .
There has been a frenzy of investor interest in ElevenLabsgoing back several months , on the back of two important stream . First , there has been a immense wave of hoopla around generative AI that has been catching a quite a little of company in its wake . Second , ElevenLabs has emerge as a major musician among those provide synthetic voice applied science . slews of major publisher and contentedness creators across vertical like mass medium and gaming , as well as a number of other technical school startups , are all using ElevenLabs ’ technology to power their voice and audio features .
Unsurprisingly , that has translated into a very crowded support around with a bunch of prominent names .
New investors in this Series C include NEA , World Innovation Lab ( WiL ) , Valor , Endeavor Catalyst Fund , and Abu Dhabi investment business firm Lunate . Past investors also participating admit Sequoia Capital , Salesforce Ventures , Smash Capital , SV Angel , NFDG , and BroadLight Capital .
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Alongside these , ElevenLabs is also picking up a number of young strategic backer — that is , company using its engineering science who are now investing in it , too . These let in Deutsche Telekom , LG Technology Ventures , HubSpot Ventures , NTT DOCOMO Ventures , and RingCentral Ventures .
ICONIQ partner Seth Pierrepont will join the company ’s circuit board , alongside survive display panel members Jennifer Li from a16z and the carbon monoxide gas - founders of the society .
ICONIQ has been ramping up its activity around generative AI startups . intercept into written output , the truehearted alsoco - lead a $ 200 million round in Writerlast November .
“ We have always felt that audio is a very important modality , and we thought there will be a very big company built in this class , ” Pierrepont told TechCrunch . “ We have observe ElevenLabs from its launch , and we were impressed by the lineament of the applied science , how quickly it ascend in terms of mindshare and impulse , and the depth of domain expertness of the founders . ”
Pierrepont added that as a table fellow member , a lot of the conversations with the ship’s company will be around creating new use caseful for audio and finding the right markets for it .
At a fourth dimension when startups are still incur it challenge to close growth rounds , it ’s notable that ElevenLabs raised its Series B round of $ 80 million , which value it at $ 1 billion , just a year ago . ElevenLabs has raised a total of $ 281 million to date .
The product roadmap
In gain to a focus on ameliorate its AI model , the company plans to expend the support to grow its conversational AI builder with an ambition to reach more consumers direct and through partnerships .
Last year , the party debutedan AI conversational broker platform , and a cardinal part of that merchandise was developing a talking to - to - text element . Staniszewski noted that the caller want to improve in that country a mass more .
“ We want to understand what ’s being said by you in a conversation well . We are mould on ways to move aside from only generating mental object and apprehension and transcribe delivery , ” Staniszewski said . “ Many people say that manner of speaking - to - textbook is a figure out trouble . But for many spoken communication , it is somewhat spoilt . We call back we can build better language detecting model because we have in - house teams to comment data and give us quick feedback . ”
The company also wants to double down on create AI - power colloquial agents by indorse legacy communication like telephony and well integrate different sort of knowledge sources . This is part why it is partnering with telcos in this round .
It ’s also being used by its client to intercept into their own archives . Last year , ElevenLabs partner withTIME publication to deploy a conversational botfor users to postulate questions about TIME Person of the Year .
Staniszewski said the troupe visualize more conversational AI agent on situation : On word website , for example , user would be capable to require questions about narrative or ask the bot to summarize them .
The CEO also noted that while AI - powered representative bot ’ quality has improved , the problem of sounding natural while respond to humans speaking or emoting in different ways has not been solved yet .
“ The way I speak to you impacts how you oppose or respond to me . Sometimes , I ’ll be frantic , or sometimes , I ’ll be calm , and at times , I will interrupt you . You will answer to me accordingly . Current - gen AI resolution are on the verge of being well , but they are not as proficient as humans , ” Staniszewski aver .
ICONIQ ’s Pierrepont also emphasized that if AI does n’t understand you well when you are talking , automobile communicating fall apart down and substance abuser immediately suffer sake .
ElevenLabs has mostly grown its reach ( and revenue funnel shape ) by manner of B2B partnership . But it ’s also going out on a direct branch , too .
In 2024 , the startup launched its first purely consumer - facing product , ElevenLabs Reader , an app that reads out articles , school text , and text file . Later , the society added the ability tocreate a podcast with productive AI voicesfrom written document and web Page — not unlike what you’re able to do with Google ’s NotebookLM . Staniszewski said that it want to enlarge into more consumer experience .
It may actually already be doing that . TechCrunch spotted that the company has been screen a program on the ElevenLabs Reader app invite users to publish audiobooks on the platform . The company also wants to give prick to Lord to have multiple part understand out an audiobook in the future while also creating better localisation .
Staniszewski noted that the company is figuring out ways for users and companies to better stagger their content , include on its own app . Whether that brings it into actual direct contest with its customers will be something to watch over . ( That has been one cause why many B2B tech companies favor to stay on away from verbatim - to - consumer play . ) Notably , ElevenLabs powerfulness representative engineering for audio subject platforms likeLightspeed - back Pocket FMandGoogle - backed Kuku FM .
ElevenLabs already power AI - generated audio on ware and platforms like Perplexity , Rabbit R1 , Chess.com , ESPN , Lex Fridman podcast , The Atlantic , and Synthesia . The goal for the company is to be in more situation and also own an death - to - end conversation stack so it can generate more experiences and insights for its customer .
Safety
Not all of ElevenLabs ’ silver lining have been without clouds : Its tech has been implicated in a few notable misinformation campaigns . A late report from terror intelligence company Recorded Future found thatthe fellowship ’s product was used in a Russian propaganda operation . Last year , someone used the caller ’s voice platform to createan audio deepfake of Joe Biden . In 2023,Motherboardreported that 4chan members allegedly used the AI audio generation tool to make voices that sounded like Joe Rogan , Ben Shapiro , and Emma Watson to spread problematic mental object .
But the ship’s company has been straightaway to respond . Today , it has a policy nix “ unauthorised , harmful , or deceptive impersonation . ” Plus , it utilise a mixture of machine - lead and human moderateness to weed out such content . However , as the party grows its solidifying of peter and has more lineal consumer touchpoints , this launch the door to more opportunities for malicious actors to look for ways to misuse it .
“ As one of the frontrunners of AI audio body of work , we do plow it as our responsibility to build the right rubber mechanism as we build out the engineering . We will frequently make pick to prioritise safety over swiftness of deployment or commercial-grade benefit , ” Staniszewski said .
Staniszewski added that while the company follow C2PA , a standard to track content using metadata , it also hasa public toolthat allows anyone to see if audio recording was generated through ElevenLabs technology using digital signatures it places in the audio frequency during generation . That could also be a data track that continues to develop over prison term as approaches for misuse also become more sophisticated .
