AI audio startup ElevenLabs has raised $500 million in a Series D funding round.
According to Music Business WorldwideThe funding round gives the startup a valuation of $11 billion, more than triple its valuation just a year ago.
The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, with partner Andrew Reed joining the ElevenLabs board. Investors Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ have significantly increased their stakes, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital and BOND joining as new investors.
Other backers including BroadLight, NFDG, Valor Capital, AMP Coalition and Smash Capital also participated. Additional investors are expected to be announced later this month.
The funding round comes six months after the company launched Eleven Music, a rival to Suno and Udio, marking its expansion beyond text-to-speech into fully AI music generation. It has already entered into licensing agreements with prominent rights holders such as Merlin and Kobalt.
This funding brings ElevenLabs’ total raised to $781 million in five rounds since its founding by CEO Mati Staniszewski and CTO Piotr Dąbkowski in 2022.
ElevenLabs initially developed AI text-to-speech technology, but has since expanded into text-to-speech, sound effects, dubbing, music, and conversational AI.
ElevenLabs says it plans to use the latest investment to “continue to develop research and products” and expand its international expansion.
“Mati and Piotr are exceptional founders and leaders,” Reed said. “They have made ElevenLabs one of the most successful and influential companies in the global AI ecosystem.
“From cutting-edge research to stunning creative tools to enterprise-scale voice agents, ElevenLabs is changing the way people communicate and interact with technology, with organizations and institutions, and with each other. It’s an honor to join their board.”
Co-founder Dąbkowski said: “We started by creating a voice that could sound human – and we did. Today, we are building foundational models across the entire audio stack – speech synthesis, transcription, music, dubbing and conversational models with a world-class research team.”
“And we’re going even further by optimizing them to deliver the best product experiences that we believe will redefine benchmarks.” »