Welcome, ElevenLabs!
AI audio tools for creators, media, and businesses.
- Founders: Mati Staniszewski, Piotr Dabkowski
- Location: London, UK
- Industry: Artificial Intelligence
The Opportunity
Voice is the most natural and effective form of human-machine interface. Voice interfaces are over 3x faster than typing interfaces. Yet prior to recent developments in Generative AI, we could not use computers to create voices on-demand with human-like quality. Traditional text-to-speech solutions (e.g., Amazon’s Alexa voice) were limited: they sounded robotic, lacked natural prosody, were too slow for real-time interactions, and had heavy compute requirements. These solutions were even less performant in non-English languages. These constraints meant the human-machine interface was limited to typing across most applications and creative content remained inaccessible to voice narration or cross-language access.
The production of voice was inefficient and manual, requiring hours of human time and resources to record and assemble voice content. Only 5% of books become audiobooks, just a fraction of filmed entertainment gets dubbed into other languages, and robotic voices are the norm when you call into customer service. Motivated by the poor quality of American films dubbed into Polish (where a single male actor would voice all the parts!), ElevenLabs founders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski set out to make any content accessible in any language with any voice.
The Solution
ElevenLabs has pioneered an AI-powered approach to voice creation that’s fundamentally transforming how we generate and interact with audio content. Their proprietary Text to Speech Flash Model achieves sub-75 millisecond latency (and getting faster) and human-like quality, complete with natural breaths, mistakes, and emotion – creating voices that are indistinguishable from human speech. The technology excels in voice quality and naturalness while supporting an impressive 32 languages, with more languages to come.
Since its founding in 2022, ElevenLabs has evolved from a developer-friendly API-first text-to-speech infrastructure solution to a complete audio platform used by employees at 62% of Fortune 500 companies and 1,000 years of AI audio generated to date. The use cases for ElevenLabs’ technology are as endless as the use of the human voice itself. Their platform also allows customers to easily create customizable, embeddable voice agents powered by their AI models of choice and their proprietary knowledge bases. In the long run, we envision a world where a voice interaction between a business and its customers is as much the default as email is today.
Most touchingly, their technology has a massive impact for good. ElevenLabs is preserving the natural voices of those losing their ability to speak due to conditions like ALS or Motor Neuron Disease (MND). The company has successfully helped over 1,000 people reclaim their voice — including Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton and former Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza.
Why We’re Doubling Down on ElevenLabs
Our investments in ElevenLabs are rooted in the belief that voice represents the future of human-machine interaction. Thanks to ElevenLabs’ technology lowering the cost of creating voice by orders of magnitude, coupled with human-like voice quality, there’s an explosion of demand for voice in software applications. As AI-generated voices achieve the naturalness and latency of human speech, they can address increasingly critical use cases that previously only human voices could serve.
ElevenLabs is the clear leader at the intersection of Generative AI and voice technology. They were among the first to bring generative AI techniques to speech and create a low latency, human-like Voice Model. And they have sustained their advantage over their lifetime, leading the market in quality, performance, language support, and ease of use.
The founding team brings an exceptional combination of technical expertise, commercial vision, and speed of execution. Co-founders Mati and Piotr have shipped exceptionally fast, pushing the technological frontiers of audio AI. And as they’ve scaled their business, we’ve been impressed by their integrity, commitment to empowering AI for good, and the exceptional talent they’ve collected.
What’s Ahead?
We see ElevenLabs becoming the foundational layer for voice and audio AI across industries as voice becomes the preferred human-machine interface. We’re excited to double down on our investment from the previous Series B round and welcome Iconiq and NEA alongside existing investors a16z and Sequoia. We look forward to supporting ElevenLabs as they give our technological world a voice.
Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, ElevenLabs!
Related Articles
