UK-based artificial intelligence voice company ElevenLabs has raised a further $500 million in fresh funding, pushing its valuation to $11 billion and cementing its position as one of Britain’s most valuable private tech firms.
The latest round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz and actor Matthew McConaughey. The deal more than triples ElevenLabs’ valuation from a year ago and brings total funding raised since its 2022 launch to $781 million.
Founded in London by former Google engineer Piotr Dąbkowski and ex-Palantir employee Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs has rapidly become a global leader in AI-generated speech. Its technology converts text into highly realistic, human-like voices, supports multilingual dubbing, and has recently expanded into music and sound effect generation.
The platform is increasingly being adopted by enterprises to create AI-powered customer service agents capable of conversing naturally in more than 30 languages. Clients include Deliveroo, Deutsche Telekom, Square, Revolut and the Ukrainian government.
The company has also been at the centre of wider debates around voice cloning and intellectual property. In response, ElevenLabs last year launched its “iconic voice marketplace”, allowing actors and estates to license their voices for commercial use. High-profile participants include Michael Caine and Liza Minnelli, with rights holders able to approve or reject individual requests.
The move is seen as a significant attempt to establish commercial guardrails in an industry facing growing scrutiny over consent, misuse and deepfake content. ElevenLabs previously settled a legal dispute with actors who alleged their voices had been used without permission.
Beyond voice, the company has broadened its ambitions. In August it unveiled an AI music generator capable of producing studio-quality tracks from text prompts, and it continues to invest heavily in transcription, dubbing and conversational AI.
Dąbkowski said the latest funding would accelerate ElevenLabs’ expansion beyond speech. “We started by building a voice that could sound human,” he said. “Now we’re developing foundational models across voice, transcription, music and conversational agents with a world-leading research team.”
The scale of the valuation underlines continued investor appetite for AI infrastructure companies, even as concerns mount over inflated valuations across the sector. ElevenLabs’ growth, however, reflects strong enterprise demand for tools that bring automation closer to human interaction — a space many believe will define the next phase of AI adoption.
