Founded in 2022 by ex-Googler Piotr Dabkowski and former Palantir strategist Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs is an AI voice startup that specializes in developing natural-sounding speech synthesis software using deep learning. According to TechCrunch, the company is on the brink of closing a funding round at a $3 billion valuation.
The company scored ‘unicorn’ status just 2 years after its inception when it raised an $80M Series B round co-led by A16Z at a $1.1 billion valuation. The company’s latest valuation is supported by skyrocketed revenues that jumped from $25 million at the end of 2023 to $80 million currently.
ElevenLabs’ value proposition lies in its ability to generate speech that sounds far more natural than any other chat bot including Apple’s Siri, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s voice models. So much so that Nike used the software to create a clone of the NBA star Luka Dončić’s voice for a recent shoe campaign. New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s office also cloned the politician’s voice so that it could deliver robocall messages in Spanish, Yiddish, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Haitian Creole.
Here’s ElevenLab’s first pitch deck:
ElevenLabs was co-founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski. The co-founders, who grew up in Poland, were inspired to create voice cloning tools by poorly dubbed American films. The two co-founders bring extensive experience from their previous roles at tech giants Google and Palantir. According to them, the goal is to “build cutting-edge technology to make content accessible across languages”.
The London-based startup develops text-to-speech software using AI to create natural-sounding voices. Other companies that are targeting the synthetic voice generation market include Murf, Tavus, Resemble AI, Respeecher and Lovo. The startup provides speech solutions including dubbing, subtitles generation, translation, and noise separation.
ElevenLabs’ vision is for automatic dubbing to power seamless communication and content across any language. Their seed deck envisioned a wide variety of use cases: ranging from real-time dubbing and voice conversion to localization, advertising, and professional dubbing. To begin with, ElevenLabs’ initial beachhead market was focusing on automated dubbing for creators.
The AI dubbing and localization market is projected to be a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. With this upcoming round, ElevenLabs’ valuation ($3B) will surpass the estimated yearly TAM of $2B in their seed deck.
See the full 11-slide pre-seed pitch deck that ElevenLabs used to raise $2M in 2023 (and thousands more) at bestpitchdeck.com/eleven-labs