ElevenLabs hits $22B valuation in employee tender, doubling in months
What's the deal? ElevenLabs closed an employee tender offer valuing the AI voice startup at $22 billion, co-led by Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price. That's double the valuation from its Series D in February.
The investors: Goldman SachsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, GIC, Ontario Teachers' Pension PlanDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, EQT GroupDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Sapphire Ventures, and BDT & MSD PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → joined the round. Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Alkeon Capital, The D. E. Shaw GroupDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, DisruptiveDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Evantic Capital, ICONIQ, and Lightspeed also took part.
The Ontario Teachers' angle: The pension plan invested through Teachers' Venture Growth (TVG), its late-stage venture and growth platform. In a LinkedIn post on 1 October 2026, TVG Managing Director Ara YeromianDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → said voice is becoming one of the most important interfaces between people and AI, and that ElevenLabs stood out for its technology, product quality and commercial execution. He said TVG will work with co-founders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski as ElevenLabs expands globally, including into Canada. The deal comes a week after TVG joined the second close of Harvey's US$600M round on 24 September 2026, another AI investment pitched partly on growth in the Canadian market.
Why now? The company says growth is driven by enterprise demand to deploy its ElevenAgents across sales, support, and operations. Enterprise now accounts for 55% of revenue, and ElevenAgents now handles more than 15 million conversations a week, up threefold since February 2026, with its ARR also up more than threefold over that period.
What's the endgame? Beyond its models, ElevenLabs has built a platform that lets organisations deploy conversational agents connected to their own knowledge and systems. Its technology is used in daily operations at five of the world's ten largest tech companies, five of the ten largest insurers, and four of the ten largest telecoms.
The product: Alongside the tender, ElevenLabs released two new text-to-speech models, Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, which it calls its fastest and most emotive yet. The company started in 2022 with a $9 million valuation and its first model, Eleven v1.
The signal: A 2x valuation jump in months, backed by pension funds and asset managers rather than pure venture money, shows how quickly capital is flowing into enterprise AI voice as businesses move agents from pilots into daily operations.
Image credit: ElevenLabs
Read more: ElevenLabs · Mati Staniszewski on LinkedIn · Ara Yeromian on LinkedIn · Ontario Teachers'
