ElevenLabs turns up the volume in India

Welcome to The Prompt, your guide to the biggest issues and developments shaping AI, with Asia front and center. Want full access to all our AI reporting? Subscribe here.

Hello reader,

Have you been to a party entirely soundtracked by AI-generated music? I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I spotted it on the agenda for last week’s ElevenLabs Summit in Bengaluru. But it turned out to be not that bad.

The London-based AI voice startup hosted its post-event party on the terrace of one of Bengaluru’s tallest skyscrapers, with free-flowing wine and beer for close to 1,000 attendees.

Fittingly enough, ElevenLabs has had plenty of reasons to celebrate.

The company raised US$500 million in February, and its top leadership arrived in India fresh off a US$300 million employee tender offer that doubled its valuation to US$22 billion. It has also just opened an office in Singapore.

But of all the places to throw a party of this scale, India is a particularly interesting choice.

Image credit: Made by Ulla/Tech in Asia with the help of AI

The country is a linguistic maze. I have long wondered how AI, whose most powerful models are built largely around English and Chinese, would fare here.

CEO Mati Staniszewski believes that if ElevenLabs can crack “how people interact with AI” in India, it can “solve it anywhere in the world,” pointing to the country’s 22 officially recognized languages and thousands of dialects and accents. The company plans to invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” here as well, Reuters reported.

India is already ElevenLabs’ largest market outside the US, according to Staniszewski. The company now wants to expand its support from 14 Indian languages to all 22 officially recognized languages in the country.

Karthik Rajaram, ElevenLabs’ India head, told me the goal is to also tackle the country’s countless dialects.

For now, the company appears to have a head start.

ElevenLabs said it has signed up more than 250 enterprises. Several developers at the event told me they use multiple AI voice models but found ElevenLabs the most consistent, especially for local languages.