ElevenLabs raises $500M Series D at $11B valuation, hits $330M ARR with enterprise voice agents

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11 Labs, the man of the hour. How are you doing?

What's going on,

Johny? Great to see you again.

You look fantastic. This cover is iconic. It's I mean, props to you, but also the photographer on this. Like perfect lighting. I've always been a fan of Forbes photography. It's so nice to see somebody just beaming too. Just having a good time. Usually people people are on the cover acting all serious, mysterious, you know. I like to see I like to see

we are having a good time at 11 laps. It's a good good good and happy moment building at the current age and everything is changing with AI. We have a chance of building at the frontier of that change. Uh but a little bit surreal to see the cover and a zoomed in picture. So that's always a tip of the iceberg and reflection of the entire team. So great, great to see it.

Yeah, it's amazing. How did the negotiation go with this current round? I'm sure you had a sort of your interest was, you know, coming in at 11. I'm sure that gave you gave gave some leverage.

Couldn't do 10.9.

Yeah,

this was in in this round the the valuation was known far before the round even started. uh with with our aspirations from the early days to get that and of course just surreal to be able to announce today that we've uh raised 500 million series at 11 billion valuation.

The next the next the next leg up will uh will be tough getting to 11 trillion but

we're we believe

we have it all planned. It's going to be 11 squared next to 21 billion as the as the next proxy of valuation. But this funding is great. We we we think this is what we need to get and transform how we interact with technology. SEOA is leading the round. Android is joining the board.

A6V is quadrupling down.

Iconic is tripling down. And alongside the around as always we are releasing incredible updates to our voice agents to make them more expressive, quicker, lower latency so people companies can build even better experiences and customer experience, internal enablement and sales. So

yeah, we were just we were just laughing. We were just lot we were watching uh some of the new Super Bowl ads from Enthropic and and they intentionally put a bit of lag in there when when in the model and

that's your opportunity and that's the opportunity. It's like just reducing that latency to to human or or even uh superhuman.

Yeah. What has the%

what's been the biggest driver of growth just uh just more growth on the core products, new products? what's uh walk me through sort of how I would visualize the growth chart that went in the in the lead slide of this deck.

So we started in 2022 the first model was texttospech and then we continued expanding with incredible researchers in the team still speech to text with the best transcription model 11 music with the highest quality music model productions with dubbing. But the real innovation that we brought in 2025 was agents and conversational models. So helping enterprises build that uh um customer experience work internal enablement and in 2025 we got to 330 million in ARR at the end of the year powered by work with DA telecom

amazing virtual telecom customer support square deliverable with training riders and on boarding them into the ecosystem better or calling restaurants to capture what's happening with the menu what's happening with the opening hours um all the way through to Revolute working with us across 4 million of their users in Europe to be able to uh to bring that level of customer care that frequently wasn't possible. Um and we are seeing that I think something that wasn't possible just a year prior. You have a real time voice agent interactions. Jord, you were mentioning Antropic. We think all companies in the future will want to optimize that latency, will want to optimize that reliability so they can interact with the with the with the with their audience, with their customers. Um, and whether that's in customer care, whether that's devices around us, hopefully some of the devices you have will be able to speak back to you and converse with you as the guys come in all the way through to the to the future robots. And um, and that enterprise adoption over last year has been tremendous. We grew to 330 million and it took us

20 months to get to first 100 million in IR 10 months to get to 200 and 5 months to get to 330. So hopefully that continues

and it's a good proxy of the value that we can we can deliver.

Incredible.

Uh well, we have a special guest.

Yeah,

we should bring him in.

Let's bring in Andrew Reed from Sequoia. New board member.

New board member alert.

How you doing?

What's going on?

Hey guys.

Hey, good to see you.

Good seeing you. I was uh I was enjoying when you were uh when you were bringing on Mati and I've realized that's very important for a Polish entrepreneur to become a oneame entrepreneur

because no one wants to go for the last name and we're not brave enough to do it either.

Yeah. Much easier when you're

uh so so so talk to us about uh like the surface area of the business now. Uh there was someone in the chat saying that they were just using 11 reader last night. uh I is that more of like a demo and a showcase of the product or do you see that as growing into its own sort of consumer AI application?

Yeah. And first of all, great to see you here, Andrew. Welcome to the board. Welcome to 11 Labs after two and a half years knowing each other. It's going to be a a great fun after serving on the board together.

Oh, yeah. Pleasure to have you with us.

And it was the last time we saw you guys, which is great. So it's a full circle full circle moment. But uh you know to your question as you think about our business we have the foundational research layer where we do everything across audio

whether it's text to speech speech to text whether that's the expressive narration expressive voiceovers the music work and on top of that work we have the agents work that we spoke about but also the creative use cases and really there is a great example of that of how we can let our community create the narrations create audio books and then serve them in an easier way. Mhm.

You know what's crazy

is that today Audible will block AI audio books.

Oh, weird.

The only platform that allows you to serve the content on Audible is is is only the Amazon created AI content. So, we need to find an alternative for of the community to serve that and similarly uh happily I have a partnership with Spotify to to allow our users to bring that and we have a lot of users. It's 5 million users doing

doing that work.

There you go. Uh, Andrew, how are you how are you processing the the SAS apocalypse, the turmoil in the markets? Is this like a hey uh you know, 11 Labs needs a war chest, batten down the hatches, rip good times, or is this uh something else that's you know, you don't really need to worry about who's who's getting beat up in the public markets because you're the reason why they're getting beat up.

Well, I I go back to what Jason Jason Lumpkin was saying. He was bringing up 11 Labs as an example last week because he said he has a lot of portfolio companies and they're like, "We're AI native. we're AI native. And he's like, "Show me the numbers. Are you crying?"

11 Labs is AI native and they're adding $100 million in new ARR every few months. So like that's what it looks like. That's that's what real pull from the market.

Sure. But yeah, Andrew, what what do you see in the market?

Yeah, I think the um you know, it's like the scorpion and the frog. Uh uh the voting machine will be a voting machine. And I think in the public markets with software um there is a lot of baby being being thrown out with the bathwater.

Um and I think as far as I can tell the only prerequisite for being an AI native company is being a private company. Um and I'll leave that there. I do think what really matters is um are businesses accelerating as these models are getting better

and are they delivering value in a way that's like differentiated and unique and we are seeing companies like 11 that are growing

faster with better economics better customer references um and just faster deployment than anything else we've ever seen um

like I've uh going back to when I first met Marti uh 2023 uh I remember what like when I first looked at 11 um it was not obvious like what kind of company this is. Is it a is it a consumer company? Is it an enterprise company? Is it a foundation model lab? Is it an application company? And um it turns out it was all of those things. And I think for like these truly like the the true AI winners um it's a you know like the phrase going from strength strength to strength. It's like everywhere 11 has been competing, they have just been dominating. And you know, like shame on me for not investing a zillion dollars three years ago. Um, fortunately, we were lucky to invest a little bit and I got to know Motti. Um, but yeah, these these like the new wave of these AI companies are just incredible. Can you both talk about a little like take me through more of that focus because uh you're saying you know 11 is a is a research lab and a and an enterprise company and there's a consumer product and but there's still a focus on audio still focused on voice and we've seen you know the a lot of the good vibes that are coming around anthropic is like they're focused on code uh you know we've seen this like midjourney focused on images and you get to this opinionated thing is that where you're narrowing or or do you see yourself kind of expanding out on all surface areas over time,

right? And it it it is true like as we as we started the company, the one connective tissue from model through platform to application is audio and voice. We know that we can create the best models, we know we can serve them, build for the users, understand those use cases and then bring them for production. But of course to get most of voice frequently we'll stretch from other sister fields to bring those integrations into default with agents example you need the knowledge base to really integrate that you need telefony systems to make sure the agents interact in WhatsApp or can call the phone numbers you need the evaluation testing and monitoring to really be able to understand that so as we think about this work voice audio is our superpower that's the one connective tissue across all those domains but if we can bring from other fields and elevate the entire voice experience whether it's in voice agents whether it's in a voice uh a creative space uh we'll happily do that

uh where where are you frustrated with slow adoption like where where is there a lot of potential that uh where companies are not kind of like they haven't fully processed that uh that the models are advanced to the level that they have and you guys have the sort of feature set I I on a personal level as a user there's still a bunch of different like media subscriptions that I have that have just like really poor like audio functionality. It's like if you publish an article, you should immediately have like, you know, a mini podcast equivalent that I can listen to in real time. It's shouldn't be like this doesn't seem like a hard problem anymore, but I'm sure you're seeing that kind of in other categories too where you want industries to wake up and say like, "Hey, voice is here. You should be implementing it immediately." Yeah, I can go quick quick quick one first on on things that we believe in and andre is uh helping us push as we think about that space. The one audio will be default and all the content stories knowledge that's available. It will be global. You will have all the languages all the voices represented and voice will be the interface of technology around us. The big opportunity to to your question will be in the media entertainment space that we haven't seen on the agent side. Today a lot of the use cases are reactive supportive but we'll see that proactive side where you have an AI concur AI assistant that can help you for the entirety of that journey. Um and um and as we work with Andrew we frequently think of like what's that connective tissue between research and product how we can combine that experience together to deliver that.

Andrew I'm curious what you think. We we spoke a little bit about this but what's top of all your mind for the next year?

Yeah. Um, well, I I think at a high level, uh, it's very hard to find like markets where voice is not taking off. And I think I'm old enough to have lived through the initial wave of like chatbot voice agent companies in the kind of 2015 to 2019 era. And for those companies, it was, you know, enterprise vendors foisting uh, forcing audio upon consumers and consumers, you know, asking for a real agent over and over and over again. Like that was sort of I think

talk to a human. Talk to a human.

One could argue that like the you know like the customer research that like created you know like voice agents was people asking for agents over and over and over again. Um I think the difference now is uh if you look across like basically every sector um people like interfacing with technology through voice and audio like it's a it's there's a lot of uh end customer pull. I do think there's a big gap between, you know, what people expect the voice agents to be able to do and how they communicate with them versus what they're actually capable of. Um, like I think humans are very adaptable and I think once everyone used chatbt and realized, you know, what the um, chat bots can do, people started, you know, uh, start interacting with text boxes on the internet very differently. I think with voice agents still like people think they're in a phone tree and are trying to talk to it like a phone tree when in reality it's this magical interface that overlaps all of a uh a company's capabilities and it allows you to express yourself and receive information back in a brand new communication style and a brand new interface. I think once people realize what these agents are capable of, my guess is the way people interact with their institutions, with their governments, with their, you know, the the companies that they buy services and goods from is going to change very quickly.

And I do think it's going to take like the leading the leading companies in the space to show people what's possible and the whole thing's going to flip.

Very cool. And you know on the last one you just to add a quick example we've seen that we work with the government of Ukraine on exactly that and one incredible case was they are breathing an effective voice agent for the citizen support where you can call and ask about the services and what's transpiring is that the moment you can call in and you frequently just don't know where to find information. If you can just speak through and let the agent navigate through to the right help it uh it just open up so many more programs that were just not available. whether that was in the how do I travel, what's happening around the country, how do I apply for certain um certain help um just opens up completely new ways of you exploring that information altogether.

Yeah, I I'm excited about seeing some new UI patterns. Like I feel like the walkietalkie is potentially like a better even comp than like the phone call because if I'm like using a product and I have a question. I don't really want to like place a phone call necessarily even if it's instant and quick and I know like an agent you know an AI agent will like pick effectively pick up the call immediately. You can imagine like hey how like where uh what's the best document for like this part uh to understand this part of the organization. and it can like pull it up and it's like having having these kind of new UI patterns I think will be very cool.

Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and chat with us.

Talk to you guys soon.

Looking forward to the next one.

Thank you very much for having us. Congrats on the new Super Bowl ad.

Thank you. Very excited.

Congrats to you to you both supporting us. We appreciate it.

Thank you for just make sure that make sure the ad's available in Polish, too.

We will we'll do a translation.

Help us out. Help us out. Have a good one.

Goodbye.

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