The speech AI research and deployment startup ElevenLabs revealed that it has raised $80 million (about €73.46 million) in a Series B funding round.
According to Bloomberg, the company has achieved unicorn status with this financing, valued at $1.1B (about €1.01B).
Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross led the Series B investment, with participation from Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Smash Capital, BroadLight Capital, and Credo Ventures.
In addition to the money, ElevenLabs has disclosed additional product advancements, including a quick text-to-audio converter, an early-preview mobile app reader, and a voice library marketplace with a new Dubbing Studio for full movie dubbing.
For the first three months, the Mobile App reader is free to use, and early access registration is available.
Investigating uncharted territory in voice generation
In 2022, ElevenLabs was established by former Google machine learning engineer Piotr Dąbkowski and former Palantir deployment strategist Mati Staniszewski.
According to the business, it is the industry leader in natural speech synthesis and allows users to create AI voices with a wide range of dialects and languages that can express a variety of emotions and intonations.
Since its founding, the company has grown from 5 to 40 people, and consumers have generated over 100 years of audio. Presently, workers at 41% of Fortune 500 organizations use technology developed by ElevenLabs.
Use of Capital
ElevenLabs plans to appropriately implement AI technology and improve its product offerings with the investment. Applications of the technology can be found in a variety of fields, such as education, entertainment, and accessibility enhancements.
The business put a high priority on content identification and safe AI development. To increase its coverage across more speech AI models, it introduced an AI Speech Classifier to validate material created by ElevenLabs.
“Our team’s dedication has already made a lasting impact on voice AI,” says co-founder Dąbkowski. We can now take on even greater challenges and concentrate on preserving our competitive advantage in research and product development thanks to this additional cash.
ElevenLabs is actively creating more security measures for improved public domain safety and intends to work with distribution platforms for broader application.
“Our ambition remains the same – to transform how we interact with content by breaking down language and communication barriers,” said co-founder Staniszewski. We’re developing state-of-the-art technology to provide content accessibility across languages and voices so that everyone can connect with important information and stories.
“Although it’s still early in our journey, our progress to date is a tribute to our committed team and investors, and together, we’re helping shape the future of accessibility and communication.”
Current events
ElevenLabs formed B2B collaborations with major firms like Storytel, The Washington Post, FlowGPT, Wondershare Filmora, and Paradox Interactive in 2023 as it increased its footprint in the publishing, conversational AI, media, and gaming sectors.
The business has also added Speech Synthesis for lifelike text-to-speech, Turbo model for low latency, Voice Design, Voice Cloning, and Speech-to-Speech to its repertoire of tools, all of which were created through internal research.
With the AI Dubbing tool from ElevenLabs, audio and video can be translated into 29 languages while maintaining the voice and emotions of the original speaker. The Turbo and Speech-to-Speech models will now be expanded to include other languages.
Additionally, the company has added sophisticated tools for intricate workflows, such as Dubbing Studio, which allows for exact control over video localization aspects including transcript, translation, and sequence timing, and Projects, which streamlines the creation of published content.
ElevenLabs releases community-focused solutions like Voice Library, which has grown to include professional voice cloning-based verified voice replicas. In the recently launched Voice Library marketplace, users may provide their voices and get paid when others use them.
Users must pass a Voice Captcha verification to verify that their voice matches training samples in order to ensure user safety.
