ElevenLabs, a startup focused on AI-powered tools for creating and editing synthetic voices, has raised $80 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and entrepreneur Daniel Gross. This round, which included participation from Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, SV Angel, BroadLight Capital, and Credo Ventures, brings ElevenLabs’ total funding to $101 million and values the company at over $1 billion. The funds will be used for product development, expanding infrastructure and the team, AI research, and enhancing safety measures for responsible and ethical AI technology development.
ElevenLabs, founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski, a former Google machine learning engineer, and Mati Staniszewski, a former Palantir deployment strategist, focuses on AI-powered tools for creating and editing synthetic voices. The startup, launched in beta around a year ago, is known for its browser-based speech generation app that allows users to create lifelike voices with adjustable characteristics such as intonation, emotion, and cadence. Paying customers can upload voice samples to craft new styles using ElevenLabs’ voice cloning.
The company has expanded its offerings to cater to various applications, including creating audiobooks, dubbing films and TV shows, and generating character voices for games and marketing activations. ElevenLabs also introduced a “speech to speech” tool that aims to preserve a speaker’s voice, prosody, and intonation while automatically removing background noise. This tool is particularly useful for movies and TV shows, as it can translate and synchronize speech with the source material.
Despite its innovative offerings, ElevenLabs has faced challenges, including the use of its tools for malicious purposes. The platform has been criticized for allowing the creation of hateful messages and cloned voices that mimic celebrities. In response, ElevenLabs has taken measures to detect and prevent abuse, including a tool to detect speech created by its platform and plans to improve the detection tool to flag audio from other voice-generating AI models. The startup also aims to partner with distribution players to make the tool available on third-party platforms.
ElevenLabs has also been criticized by voice actors who claim that the platform uses samples of their voices without consent, which can be used to promote content they don’t endorse or spread misinformation. The startup is now introducing a marketplace for voices, allowing users to create a voice, verify and share it, with creators receiving compensation in the form of credit toward ElevenLabs’ premium services.
As the synthetic voice industry continues to grow, with startups like ElevenLabs and competitors such as Replica Studios, Papercup, Deepdub, Acapela, Respeecher, and Voice.ai, challenges related to ethics, abuse prevention, and the impact on traditional voice actors are likely to persist. The funding will enable ElevenLabs to further develop its products, expand its team, and address these challenges in the evolving synthetic voice market.
