ElevenLabs nears $600M run rate as voice AI startup races the model labs
What's the deal? ElevenLabs is running near $600m in annualised revenue, co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski said at the RAISE Summit in Paris. The voice-AI startup shipped its first human-sounding text-to-speech model in early 2023 and reached $100m in annual recurring revenue about 20 months later. "It's the best time to be building," he said.
Why now? The jumps have accelerated: roughly 10 months to $200m, then five to $300m by the end of 2025. Host Jason Calacanis put the current run rate near $600m, and Staniszewski did not dispute it. The climb tracks the startup's rising paper value, in talks in mid-2026 at a $22bn valuation.
What's the endgame? ElevenLabs runs on small teams of five to 10 people and has never employed product managers, embedding engineers across functions including legal, talent, and go-to-market instead. Those engineers build internal automations and help colleagues adopt AI safely, with a security check on whatever ships.
What changed for customers? Enterprises and sales teams drove much of the recent growth as real-time, interruptible voice agents grew reliable enough to trust. The company works with financial firms including RevolutDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Klarna on payment reminders, where it found callers are often more honest with an AI than a human — the shame drops away.
What could go wrong? Voice is identity, which makes misuse the constant risk. Calacanis described finding his own cloned voice running a joke podcast built from his show's archive. ElevenLabs now moderates everything it generates, checking samples at the voice and text level, blocking scam misuse, and running a classifier that flags AI-generated audio.
The signal: ElevenLabs is trying to prove a startup can outrun the labs whose models it pays to use. Its creator marketplace lets voice actors licence their voices and has paid out more than $22m, and it has licensed multilingual versions of Matthew McConaughey's voice and powered an interactive Darth Vader in Fortnite through Disney.
Read more: The Next Web
