Voice artificial intelligence startup ElevenLabs has raised $500 million in a Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with Andrew Reed joining the company’s board. This raises the company’s valuation to $11 billion, more than tripling its valuation from a year ago. It also takes its total funding to $781 million across five rounds since its founding in 2022.
ElevenLabs revealed that existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) quadrupled down on their investment, while ICONIQ tripled down, both with significant super pro-rata participation. New investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital and BOND also joined the round. Existing backers BroadLight, NFDG and Valor Capital continue to support the company, with additional investor participation expected to be disclosed later in February.
ElevenLabs, which was founded in 2022, began by developing human-like AI text-to-speech models. Since then, the company expanded beyond voice, into research across speech-to-text, sound effects, dubbing, music and conversational AI.
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“We started by building a voice that could sound human — and we did. Today, we are building foundational models across the full audio stack — text to speech, transcription, music, dubbing and conversational models — with a world-leading research team,” said Piotr Dabkowski, co-founder of ElevenLabs. “We are also optimizing these models for product experiences that we believe will redefine benchmarks,” he added.
CEO and co-founder Mati Staniszewski told TechCrunch during Web Summit in Doha, that models like those developed by ElevenLabs have recently moved beyond simply mimicking human speech — including emotion and intonation — to working in tandem with the reasoning capabilities of large language models. The result, he argued, is a shift in how people interact with technology. In the years ahead, he said, “hopefully all our phones will go back in our pockets, and we can immerse ourselves in the real world around us, with voice as the mechanism that controls technology.”
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Staniszewski also pointed to the shift to agentic AI as one of the biggest changes underway. Rather than spelling out every instruction, he said future voice systems will increasingly rely on persistent memory and context built up over time, making interactions feel more natural and requiring less effort from users.
Staniszewski also said that while high-quality audio models have largely lived in the cloud, ElevenLabs is working toward a hybrid approach that blends cloud and on-device processing — a move aimed at supporting new hardware, including headphones and other wearables, where voice becomes a constant companion. ElevenLabs is already partnering with Meta to bring its voice technology to products, including Instagram and Horizon Worlds, the company’s virtual-reality platform, according to TechCrunch.