ElevenLabs has made a name for itself building realistic AI voices.  

 

What started as two Polish engineers annoyed by terrible movie dubbing has grown into a profitable company now valued at $6.6 billion, doubling its valuation from just nine months ago. The company recently announced a $100 million tender offer led by Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from a16z and others, as its tech powers everything from Fortnite characters to customer service bots and goes toe-to-toe with OpenAI to become the default voice of AI. 

 

Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a conversation with CEO Mati Staniszewski from this year's Disrupt, where he made a surprising admission: he thinks voice models will be commoditized in just a couple of years. So what's ElevenLabs' plan when everyone else catches up? 

 

Listen to the full episode to hear about:  


  
Why ElevenLabs is pivoting from just voice models to building a conversational AI agent platform 





  
How the company is tackling deepfakes with watermarking, AI detection, and device authentication 





  
Why Staniszewski believes there will soon be more AI-generated content than human content 





  
ElevenLabs' push into music generation and partnerships to fuse audio with video models 




Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Equity

TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Max Zeff, Theresa Loconsolo

ElevenLabs just hit $6.6B, but its CEO says the real money isn't in voice anymore

DEC 10, 202523 MIN
Equity

ElevenLabs just hit $6.6B, but its CEO says the real money isn't in voice anymore

DEC 10, 202523 MIN

Description

ElevenLabs has made a name for itself building realistic AI voices.  

 

What started as two Polish engineers annoyed by terrible movie dubbing has grown into a profitable company now valued at $6.6 billion, doubling its valuation from just nine months ago. The company recently announced a $100 million tender offer led by Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from a16z and others, as its tech powers everything from Fortnite characters to customer service bots and goes toe-to-toe with OpenAI to become the default voice of AI. 

 

Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a conversation with CEO Mati Staniszewski from this year's Disrupt, where he made a surprising admission: he thinks voice models will be commoditized in just a couple of years. So what's ElevenLabs' plan when everyone else catches up? 

 

Listen to the full episode to hear about:  

  • Why ElevenLabs is pivoting from just voice models to building a conversational AI agent platform 

  • How the company is tackling deepfakes with watermarking, AI detection, and device authentication 

  • Why Staniszewski believes there will soon be more AI-generated content than human content 

  • ElevenLabs' push into music generation and partnerships to fuse audio with video models 

Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices