ElevenLabs, the AI voice startup that made waves in early 2025, has been on a whirlwind journey since its $180 million Series C funding round in January. With a $3 billion valuation, the company has made major strides, including launching its own speech-to-text model, opening an office in Japan, securing a deal with Spotify to offer audiobooks, and facing growing competition from both tech giants and other startups entering the market.
Despite the intense pace of growth, cofounder and CEO Mati Staniszewski remains calm. During a recent meeting at the Sana AI Summit in Stockholm, he was asked when he last took a holiday. His response was straightforward: “Every day is like a holiday for me.”
Founded in 2022 by Google and Palantir alumni, ElevenLabs specializes in AI-driven synthetic voice generation. The company’s core product enables the conversion of text into speech, with an emotional nuance and intonation that makes the content more engaging. This technology is already being used by notable clients like Time magazine, which uses it to narrate articles, and Nvidia, which leverages it to translate corporate videos. Additionally, UK-based Synthesia employs ElevenLabs’ tech to dub videos into multiple languages.
ElevenLabs Facing Rising Competition
The AI voice tech market is becoming increasingly crowded, with major players like OpenAI and Amazon launching their own text-to-speech models, and other startups such as Nara Labs gaining attention with its open-source model, Dia.
While acknowledging the rise of competition, Staniszewski remains confident. “We’re at the forefront of the models,” he says. “And now, with more competition emerging, there’s a growing sense of pressure, if not outright stress.” Despite this, Staniszewski views competition as a positive force, believing that ElevenLabs’ focus on research provides a key advantage.
Staniszewski credits much of the company’s success to its strong research team. He points to his cofounder Piotr Dabkowski, a Cambridge and Oxford graduate and former Google machine learning engineer, who has led the company’s efforts in developing cutting-edge AI research. “The research side is hard, but Piotr has built the best AI team in the world,” says Staniszewski. “That’s something many companies can’t easily replicate.”
Staniszewski emphasizes that ElevenLabs must continue to lead in research to stay ahead of competitors like OpenAI. “We can’t afford to fall behind or rely on outdated tools.”
Global Expansion Plans
Since its launch, ElevenLabs has rapidly expanded internationally, with offices in London, Warsaw, and New York. In the past month, the company opened its first subsidiary in Japan, a strategic move aimed at capturing the growing tech market in the Asia-Pacific region. Japan’s linguistic diversity and technological innovation were key factors in the decision to establish a presence there.
“We see Japan as an opportunity to bridge communication gaps and preserve cultural narratives,” Staniszewski explains. The company is already collaborating with local broadcasters and tech firms to integrate its dubbing technology into their translation services.
While ElevenLabs faces significant competition, Staniszewski believes its multilingual approach sets it apart from players like OpenAI, which mainly serves English-speaking markets. “We’re focusing on making the technology truly global, supporting different languages, accents, and voices,” he says. “How do we make it reliable and scalable? That’s what we’re working on.”
Despite its rapid growth, Staniszewski admits that scaling a startup presents challenges. “It’s incredibly difficult. I’m a first-time founder, and I’m still learning,” he says. Currently, ElevenLabs employs around 170 people, but the company is looking to expand, especially in its go-to-market efforts.
“We need to grow our team to support markets like Japan, India, and the US, but also focus on individual countries within Europe,” he adds. The company aims to have a physical presence in every market, working directly with clients to meet local needs.
Pioneering Innovations in Dubbing and Audiobooks
While AI has made significant progress, Staniszewski acknowledges that certain areas, such as dubbing, still require manual intervention. “We started ElevenLabs with the vision of making content available in other languages, but AI isn’t quite ready to do this at scale,” he says. However, he believes that within a year, automatic translations will be able to produce high-quality audio without human editing.
The company is also focused on revolutionizing audiobook narration. “Most audiobooks are still narrated by a single voice, and while some experiment with multiple voices, it’s complex and time-consuming,” Staniszewski explains. “But within a year, we’ll see audiobooks created with multiple voices, background sounds, and music — almost on the fly.”
Staniszewski has long been excited about the potential of conversational AI, and he still believes that AI-powered assistants, including tutors, healthcare aides, and customer support agents, will represent the future of the industry. “Agentic AI — or AI agents — is the biggest category, and we’re finally bringing voice into that space,” he says.
ElevenLabs has already made strides in this direction, with real-world use cases that interact naturally and without friction. “Over the past six months, we’ve seen real breakthroughs in how AI can engage and respond,” Staniszewski shares.
As he prepared to showcase some of ElevenLabs’ latest innovations at the Sana AI Summit, Staniszewski’s enthusiasm for live demonstrations was clear. “It’s the most real experience you can have,” he says. “And yes, things might break, but that’s part of the excitement.”
