ElevenLabs lands £370m Series D led by Sequoia Capital to double down on human-like AI text to speech model

ElevenLabs, a voice and conversational AI startup, has raised £370 million in a Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from a16z, ICONIQ, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital and BOND. The round values ElevenLabs at $11 billion and brings total funding to £570 million since its founding.

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs began by developing a human-like AI text to speech model and has since expanded across speech to text, sound effects, dubbing, music and conversational models. The business combines these models with integrations, orchestration and enterprise-grade infrastructure to deliver production-ready platforms for enterprises, creators and developers, including ElevenAgents, ElevenCreative and ElevenAPI. ElevenLabs today announced a major upgrade to its voice agents, enabling faster response times and improved expressiveness, powered by new turn-taking improvements and its Eleven v3 Conversational model.

The funding will also help strengthen ElevenLabs’ foundation, its research, by expanding work on emotional conversational models, dubbing, and audio general intelligence. It also plans to support international expansion across cities including London, New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Dublin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bengaluru, Sydney, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris and Mexico City, with locally embedded go-to-market teams supporting enterprise adoption.

We started by building a voice that could sound human - and we did. Today we are building foundational models across the full audio stack - text to speech, transcription, music, dubbing and conversational models with a world-leading research team. And we take the models even further by optimising them for the best product experiences that we believe will redefine the benchmarks.

Piotr Dabkowski, Co-founder

The intersection of models and products is critical - and our team has proven, time and again, how to translate research into real-world experiences. This funding helps us go beyond voice alone to transform how we interact with technology altogether. We plan to expand our Creative offering - helping creators combine our best-in-class audio with video and Agents - enabling businesses to build agents that can talk, type, and take action.”

Mati Staniszewski, Co-founder

Mati and Piotr are exceptional founders and leaders. They have built ElevenLabs into one of the most successful and most impactful companies in the global AI ecosystem. From world-leading research to mind-bending creative tools to enterprise voice agents at scale, ElevenLabs is changing how people communicate and interface with technology, with organisations and institutions, and with each other.

Andrew Reed, Partner at Sequoia Capital

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