AI voice startup ElevenLabs has poached a group of engineers from data analytics giant Palantir, as it looks to bolster its enterprise offering amid a sector-wide talent crunch.
At least four engineers quit Palantir for ElevenLabs between April and December 2024, according to employee data compiled by Live Data Technologies. All four joined the same team, which supports enterprise clients using ElevenLabs’ tech.
The startup has invested heavily in its engineering team over the past year, as it looks to pip Big Tech and startup rivals to a limited pool of top AI workers amid a scramble for talent in the sector.
The size of the total engineering team has increased threefold to more than 80 employees since March 2024, and is currently three times the size of any other department in the company, according to Live Data Technologies data.
“Palantir engineers have experience building solutions for some of the largest enterprises in the world,” said ElevenLabs — whose cofounder and CEO Mati Staniszewski previously worked at the US tech behemoth. “As more enterprises come to ElevenLabs to deploy voice AI at scale, we’ve built out a forward deployed engineering team to support them.”
AI buzz
ElevenLabs is building AI tech for synthetic voice generation. Its tool converts text to speech allowing clients like publishers and content creators to turn written material into audio.
The startup, founded in 2022, has become one of the buzziest AI companies in Europe over the past two years, hitting a $3.3bn valuation after a $180m Series C in January, led by US investors Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq Growth.
Peter Thiel-founded Palantir makes software for companies and governments to analyse data — drawing controversy for helping intelligence agencies like the US’s CIA with surveillance.
Since going public in 2020, the company has seen its share price soar, and is currently valued at more than $100bn. Headquartered in the US, Palantir now has offices across Europe, including London, Munich, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Norway, Madrid, Zurich and Stockholm — and has begun churning out a flywheel of tech founders in the region.
ElevenLabs’ new ex-Palantir hires are based across Europe and the US, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Tony Au-Yeung took up an ElevenLabs job in April and is based in Chicago. Sebastian Males is London-based and began work for the AI startup as a full stack software engineer in May. Maria Atanasova joined as a software engineer in September, and is based in Switzerland. Prior to Palantir she worked at Google. Spain-based Oswin Kruger Ruiz lists his job title as solutions engineer and started in December.
In February, ElevenLabs unveiled a new AI model it says outperforms rivals built by Google and OpenAI. It signalled a move towards audio transcription — a competitive space, with leaders in the field including US-based Otter and Sweden’s Sana.ai, as well as numerous Big Tech players.
“Our largest potential competition is OpenAI,” Staniszewski told Sifted in July, citing research capabilities, huge resources and vastly more funding. “They will probably start to build more and more models in audio.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/elevenlabs-poaches-palantir-engineers-news/
