elevenAnd one of the most popular startups operating in the AI Audio field said on Thursday that she raised a tour of the series C at a value of $ 180 million, and the company’s evaluation of $ 3.3 billion after money. A16z and Iconiq growth is a leading investment.
Rumors of the collection of donations were reported by Techcrunch. The final numbers confirm some details, not all of the details that we previously informed (specifically, the total size of the tour is smaller than we heard; the evaluation and the pioneer investors are identical).
Funding will be used to continue building audio tools from eleven of business tools and development.
Matte Stanisuiski, CEO who participated in the establishment of the company with childhood friend Pioter Dabkovsky, said in an interview that the start of the operation focuses its research on building more expressive audio models and has greater control. Staniszewski added that the company also focuses on “university models”: combining text -based models and its sound models for multimedia interactions.
There was a set of investor interests in eleven return for several months, against the backdrop of two important currents. First, there was a huge wave of noise around the Improvised IQ that has been caught by many companies in the wake of it. Second, ElevenLabs has emerged as a major player among those who offer artificial sound technology. Dozens of major publishers and creative vocalized content such as media and games, as well as a number of other start -up startups, all use ElevenLabs technology to play their audio and voice features.
It is not surprising that this has been translated into a very crowded financing tour with many prominent names.
New investors in this series include C Nea, World Innovation Lab (WIL), Valor, Endavor Catalyst Fund, and Abu Dhabi Investment Lunate. Former investors also participate in Sequoia Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Smash Capital, SV Angel, NFDG and BroadLight Capital.
Besides, ElevenLabs also captures a number of new strategic supporters – that is, companies that use their technology that are now investing. These include Deutsche Telekom, LG Technology Ventures, Hubspot Ventures, NTT DOCOCOMO VENTERES and Ringcentral Ventures.
IconQ Seth Pierrepont partner will join the company’s board of directors, along with the current members of the Board of Directors from A16Z and the founders of the company.
Iconiq has intensified its activities on startups AI. Take advantage of the written output, the company also participated in a $ 200 million tour of the writer last November.
“We have always felt that the sound is a very important way, and we thought that there would be a very large company designed in this category,” Pierpont told Techcrunch. “We have noticed eleven of its launch operations, and we liked the quality of technology, the speed of its rise in terms of mind and momentum, and the depth of experience with the founders.”
Pierrepont added that as a member of the Board of Directors, many talks with the company will create new use of sound and finding the appropriate markets for that.
At a time when startups still find it difficult to close growth rounds, it is worth noting that eleven of the tour with its series of $ 80 million, which amounted to one billion dollars, just one year ago. ElevenLabs raised a total of $ 281 million so far.
Product Road Map
In addition to focusing on improving artificial intelligence models, the company plans to use financing to develop its creator from artificial intelligence conversation with an ambition to reach more consumers directly and through partnerships.
Last year, the company appeared for the first time on the platform of Amnesty International’s conversation, and it was a major part of this product that developed a component of speech to the text. Staniszewski indicated that the company wants to improve in this field much more.
“We want to understand what you are in a better conversation. We are working on ways to stay away from generating content and understanding and lacking only. Many people say that talking to the text is a problem in solving it. But for many languages, it is very bad. We believe that we can Building better forms to detect speech because we have internal difference to comment on data and give us quick notes.
The company also wants to double the creation of applicable conversation agents by supporting old communications such as phone calls and better integrating different types of knowledge. This is partly the reason that it is involved with telecommunications companies in this tour.
It is also used by its customers to take advantage of their archives. Last year, eleven partnerships were held with Time post to publish a conversation robot For users to ask questions about a person of time of the year.
Staniszky said that the company imagines more artificial intelligence agents about sites: on news sites, for example, users will be able to ask questions about stories or a robot request to summarize them.
The CEO also noticed that although the VOICE BOTS quality of the Acting Voice Bots has not been solved, the natural sounding problem has not been solved while responding to humans speaking or emotion in different ways yet.
“The way I speak affects how to react or respond to it. Sometimes, I will be excited, or sometimes, I will be calm, and sometimes, I will interrupt you. You will respond to me accordingly. Staniszuski said:“ Artificial intelligence solutions The current current is about to be good, but it is not as good as humans. “
Pierrepont from Iconiq also confirmed that if artificial intelligence does not understand you well when you speak, the automatic connections collapse and lose users immediately.
ElevenLabs often grew (and the revenue path) through B2B partnerships. But it also comes out on the edges directly.
In 2024, Startup launched the first producer of consumers, ElevenLabs Reader, an application that reads articles, texts and documents. Later, the company added the ability to create podcasts with artificial intelligence sounds from documents and web pages – contrary to what you can do with Notebooklm from Google. Staniszky said he wanted to expand more consumer experiences.
It may already do it already. Techcrunch monitored that the company has tested a program on the Reader ElevenLabs app that calls on users to publish Audiobooks books on the platform. The company also wants tools for creators to read multiple sounds from a future book in the future while creating better localization.
Staniszewski noted that the company is discovering ways for users and companies to better distribute their content, including on its own application. If this leads her to real direct competition with her customers, it will be something to see it. (This was one of the reasons why many B2B technology companies prefer to stay away from the direct plays of consumers.) In particular, Tendenlabs Powers Technology for Audio Lotte Platforms like Google and Kuku FM supported by Google.
ElevenLabs is already charged with the sound created by artificial intelligence on products and platforms such as Perplexity, Rabbit R1, Chess.com, Espn, Lex Fridman Podcast, The Atlantic and Synthesia. The goal of the company is to be in more places and also have a group to one side to be able to generate more experiences and visions for its customers.
safety
Not all silver blankets of eleven clouds without clouds: their technology was involved in some prominent wrong information campaigns. A recent report issued by the threat company that was recorded in the future found that the company’s product was used in a Russian propaganda process. Last year, someone used a company’s audio platform to create A deep voice for atmosphere Biden. In 2023, Mother’s painting I mentioned that 4chaan members claim that they used an intelligence sound generation tool to create sounds that look like Joe Rogan, Bin Shapiro, Emma Watson to spread problem content.
But the company was quick to respond. Today, she has a policy that prohibits “impersonation, harmless, or deceptive.” In addition, it uses a mixture of moderation led by the machine and the human being to get rid of this content. However, since the company cultivates its tool group and has more direct consumer touch points, this opens the door for more opportunities for harmful actors to find ways to misuse them.
“As one of the applicants in Amnesty International’s audio work, we deal with it as our responsibility to build the appropriate safety mechanism while we are building technology. Staniszkisky said:
StanisZEWSKI added that while the company is tracking C2PA, which is a standard for tracking content using descriptive data, as it has Overall This allows anyone to verify whether the sound is created through eleven technologies using the digital signatures that put it in the sound during the generation. This can also be a path that continues to develop over time, even though the misuse of use becomes more advanced.
