AI synthetic voice startup ElevenLabs has reportedly raised $250m at a $3bn valuation, hoping to outpace competitors like OpenAI as demand for text-to-voice applications heats up.
The Series C round was led by US investor ICONIQ Growth, according to TechCrunch, which first reported the raise. ElevenLabs declined to comment.
It comes just a year on from the New York and London-based company hitting unicorn status with an $80m Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and featuring Sequoia Capital.
Founded in 2022 by Google and Palantir alumni, ElevenLabs is building AI tech for synthetic voice generation. Its tool converts text to speech, featuring emotion and intonation, allowing clients like publishers and content creators to turn written material into audio.
ElevenLabs tech has been used to narrate text articles by publication Time and translate corporate videos for Nvidia. UK-based AI avatar startup Synthesia — which raised $180m last week — also uses the startup’s tech to dub videos into other languages.
And like Synthesia, ElevenLabs could also end up competing against deep-pocketed Big Tech companies.
“Our largest potential competition, less now, but we think it’s on the horizon, is OpenAI,” founder Mati Staniszewski told Sifted in July, citing research capabilities, huge resources and vastly more funding. “They will probably also start to build more and more models in audio.” OpenAI rolled out voice responses on ChatGPT last year.
ElevenLabs currently has more than 200 employees, according to LinkedIn. Its product and research teams are primarily based in Europe, in the UK, alongside Poland and Hungary, while its US footprint is mostly made up of sales and partnerships teams.
The startup courted controversy in January last year when an AI-generated robot caller impersonating then-US president Joe Biden phoned some voters in New Hampshire and told them not to vote in the state’s primary election.
Some audio detection experts said the deepfake was likely created using ElevenLabs’ technology, though the company has never confirmed its tech was used.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/elevenlabs-250m-raise-news/
