- Premium Content It takes our newsroom weeks - if not months - to investigate and produce stories for our premium content. You can’t find them anywhere else.
Melissa Goh · · 5 min readAI voice generating startup ElevenLabs crosses $300m in ARR
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, has heard enough synthetic voices to tell when a voice is AI-generated or not – or so he says.
“Laughter, breathing, pauses, exasperation – the non-verbal elements are the easiest giveaways,” he points out.
ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski / Photo credit: ElevenLabs
Backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, ElevenLabs’ core product is an AI voice generator that is empathetic and sounds humanlike – and the demand for those voices is growing.
As of November, two months ahead of the company’s expected January 2026 timeline, the firm has crossed US$300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), Staniszewski tells Tech in Asia in an exclusive interview. ARR is a projection of a company’s future performance based on ongoing data.
“It took us 20 months to US$100 million, 10 months to US$200 million, five months to US$300 million … so hopefully two and a half months to US$400 million,” he jokes.
ElevenLabs’ voice agents are often used by companies to improve customer service, but they can also handle inbound product inquiries, onboard vendors, or follow up on sales leads. Meanwhile, its voice generators are commonly used by content creators in voiceovers and audiobooks.
Enterprise revenue has grown more than 200% in the past year.
While the firm is benefitting from an overall increase in demand for agents and conversational use cases globally, it’s seeing growing traction among companies for its voice agent product in Asia, where its clients include video game publisher Krafton, a large insurance firm, and a “big telco.”
A dubbing tool introduced in October allows users to translate speech into a different language while maintaining the original speaker’s voice. It’s also seeing demand from content publishers seeking to localize Southeast Asian content to an English-speaking audience.
After spending “the better part of this year optimizing for these languages,” its products are now optimized for Asian languages like Japanese, Korean, Malay, Thai, and Vietnamese, Staniszewski shares. However, its models haven’t been optimized for Singlish or Mandarin.
A previously undisclosed investment by Nvidia in September increased ElevenLabs’ valuation to US$6.6 billion.
Backing from Nvidia could propel its ambitions through support on multiple fronts, including pricing and access to GPUs.
“Nvidia is a big provider of ours. So through this strategic investment, we are doubling down on building even more on the data center side,” Staniszewski says.
Next frontier of audio
Licensed voices
On competition
Stay ahead in Asia’s tech landscape
This is premium content. Subscribe to read the full story.
ElevenLabs is licensing humanlike voices and music generation tools in the race for realistic AI speech in Asia.
We know this is not ideal. ⌛ Sign up in 20 seconds. Cancel anytime.
Our subscriber community includes professionals from these companies:
Stay updated on the go with our mobile app.
Get latest insights with smoother, more personalized experience through TIA mobile app.
