In a neat bit of number-soaked action, it’s a case of 11 meets 11.
ElevenLabs has raised $500 million in a Series D funding round, valuing the AI audio company at $11 billion and marking one of the largest private financings in the generative AI sector to date.
The round, led by Sequoia Capital, more than triples the company’s valuation from a year ago and brings total funding since its 2022 founding to $781 million. The raise comes as ElevenLabs reports accelerating enterprise adoption and positions itself at the center of a broader shift toward voice-first and conversational computing.
Mati Staniszewski, Co-Founder of ElevenLabs, said, “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.”
Momentum and adoption
The funding follows a strong close to 2025 for ElevenLabs, which ended the year with more than $330 million in annual recurring revenue. Growth has been driven primarily by enterprise customers adopting voice and conversational AI for high-volume, mission-critical use cases.
Companies and institutions including Deutsche Telekom, Square, the Ukrainian Government, and Revolut are using ElevenLabs technology for customer support, conversational commerce, citizen engagement, internal training, and inbound sales.
Platform strategy
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs initially gained attention for building human-like text-to-speech models. Since then, the company has expanded its ambitions well beyond voice synthesis. Its research efforts now span speech-to-text, sound effects, dubbing, music, and conversational AI, all integrated into enterprise-ready platforms.
The company’s product portfolio is built around three core offerings. ElevenAgents is its enterprise platform for deploying voice and chat agents at scale, with features designed for reliability, testing, monitoring, and integrations. ElevenCreative targets creators and global brands, enabling them to generate, edit, and localize audio content in more than seventy languages. ElevenAPI provides low-latency, production-grade voice infrastructure for developers, powering applications used by companies such as Meta, Epic Games, Salesforce, MasterClass, and Harvey, collectively reaching over one billion users.
Together, these platforms reflect ElevenLabs’ strategy of combining foundational AI models with infrastructure, orchestration, and tooling to make audio and conversation usable in real-world, high-stakes environments.
Conversational AI
Alongside the funding announcement, ElevenLabs unveiled an upgrade to its voice agents. The firm reckons the update delivers faster response times and improved expressiveness, enabled by new turn-taking improvements and the company’s Eleven v3 Conversational model. These enhancements are designed to make interactions feel more natural and fluid, addressing one of the key challenges in conversational AI: maintaining the rhythm and nuance of human dialogue.
The company plans to double down on ElevenAgents, positioning it as a core platform for customer experience, sales and marketing, and internal workflows. The focus reflects a broader industry trend toward AI agents that can not only respond conversationally, but also take actions across systems and processes.
Investor confidence
Sequoia Capital partner Andrew Reed is joining ElevenLabs’ board. Andreessen Horowitz quadrupled down on its investment, while ICONIQ tripled down, both participating on a super pro-rata basis.
New investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital, and BOND joined the round, while existing backers BroadLight, NFDG, Valor Capital, AMP Coalition, and Smash Capital continued their support.
Expansion and the future of interaction
ElevenLabs plans to use the new capital to expand research and product development while continuing its expansion. The company is building locally embedded go-to-market teams across cities including London, New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Dublin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bengaluru, Sydney, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, and Mexico City.
At a broader level, the company’s growth reflects a shift in how humans interact with machines. For decades, people have adapted to technology through buttons, forms, and menus. ElevenLabs believes the next phase of computing will reverse that relationship, with technology adapting to natural human communication through speech and conversation. If that vision holds, voice and conversational AI may become not just another interface, but the default way people engage with digital systems.
Last month, Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel joined a growing group of artists co-creating new songs using ElevenLabs’ AI technology.