ElevenLabs doubles its valuation in five months to $22 billion, backed by $600 million in annual recurring revenue. CEO Mati Staniszewski opens up for the first time on the strategy behind the jump, margins included.
Key Takeaways
- ElevenLabs is in talks for a secondary sale that would value the company at roughly $22 billion, up from $11 billion in February
- The company reports $600 million in annual recurring revenue, with more than half coming from enterprise accounts like Klarna and Cisco
- The CEO says he accepts thinner margins to keep gaining ground against competitors that grew out of his own technology
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ChatGPTElevenLabs Doubles in Price in Five Months
According to reporting from Bloomberg, ElevenLabs is in talks with investors over a secondary sale that would let employees cash out part of their shares at a valuation around $22 billion. The number is exactly double the $11 billion figure set during the company’s February funding round.
In an interview with TechCrunch at a conference in Toronto, co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski confirmed the company, founded in 2022, now generates $600 million in annual recurring revenue. That is fast growth for a four-year-old company, and it already ranks among the highest valuations in the voice AI space.
A secondary sale like this lets employees sell shares to outside investors without waiting for an IPO. Staniszewski declined to commit to a 2028 IPO timeline, choosing instead to talk about the “next years” without offering a specific date. That caution stands out against the company’s growth rate, a sign that leadership and investors would still rather lock in the current position before facing the quarterly pressure of a public market.
The $22 billion figure lands harder once set against the rest of the voice AI space. Few companies focused purely on voice synthesis and cloning reach a comparable scale, which puts ElevenLabs in an unusual spot, somewhere between the big generalist LLM labs and tools built around a single use case.
Klarna, Cisco, and the Enterprise Appetite
More than 55% of ElevenLabs’ revenue now comes from large accounts. Klarna runs its entire first-line phone support on this technology, covering 35 million US customers. Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, and Adobe also show up on the list of enterprise clients Staniszewski named.
That enterprise pivot lands in a voice AI market where the competition keeps tightening. ChatGPT Voice now drives a user’s entire desktop, and GPT-Live lets ChatGPT listen and talk at the same time, two features that push OpenAI onto ground where ElevenLabs had built an early edge. Large accounts are after a level of reliability and latency that newer entrants haven’t proven at scale yet, which explains why Klarna handed 35 million customer calls to ElevenLabs rather than a younger rival.
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The CEO Already Doubts His Own Competitors
Staniszewski also addressed a more unexpected problem: some of his own customers are turning into rivals. Decagon, a conversational AI platform, trained its voice product on ElevenLabs’ technology before positioning itself as a direct competitor. The CEO says he accepts that dynamic as the cost of staying the technical reference point for the industry.
On the sensitive question of disclosure, Staniszewski was direct: he thinks a company should tell customers when they’re talking to an AI rather than a human, even though few companies do that today. He admits the public isn’t quite used to the idea yet, but sees it as an inevitable shift as synthetic voice becomes common in customer service.
On margins, the CEO is clear about the strategic call he’s making: let them compress rather than slow down growth. He would not discuss specific gross margin numbers on the record, but framed the trade-off as a deliberate one, betting that market share compounds into pricing power later rather than the other way around.
For a pro weighing a voice cloning or music generation tool right now, this valuation confirms one thing above all: the market is betting that voice stays a central entry point into AI, well beyond the plain text chatbot.
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