$500 million. $11 billion valuation. And they're only four years old.
ElevenLabs, the London-based voice AI company, just announced its Series D round, and the numbers are hard to ignore. The raise more than triples the $3.3 billion valuation the company picked up barely a year ago during its $180 million Series C.
For founders watching the AI funding landscape, this is a signal worth paying attention to.
What ElevenLabs Actually Does
If you've used an AI-generated voice in the last two years, there's a decent chance ElevenLabs was behind it.
Founded in 2022 by Polish engineers Piotr Dąbkowski and Mati Staniszewski, the company started with a focused mission: build truly human-sounding text-to-speech. They nailed it. Then they expanded into transcription, dubbing, sound effects, music generation, and conversational AI.
Their developer platform, ElevenAPI, now powers voice infrastructure for companies including Meta, Salesforce, Epic Games, MasterClass, and Harvey, reaching over one billion users globally. On the enterprise side, clients like Deutsche Telekom, Square, Revolut, and even the Ukrainian Government are using ElevenAgents for customer support, conversational commerce, citizen engagement, and inbound sales.
There's also ElevenCreative, a platform for creators and brands to generate, edit, and localise high-fidelity audio across more than seventy languages. Brands like Duolingo, Nvidia, and TIME use it to create and localise content for global audiences.
The company closed 2025 with over $330 million in annual recurring revenue. Enterprise revenue alone grew 200% year-over-year. And the plan? Double that revenue figure in 2026.
Who's Backing the Round
Sequoia Capital led the Series D, with partner Andrew Reed joining ElevenLabs' board. But it's the behaviour of existing investors that tells the real story.
Andreessen Horowitz quadrupled its investment. ICONIQ Capital tripled down. Both made significant super pro-rata commitments, a strong signal that top-tier VCs aren't just optimistic, they're deeply convicted.
New investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital, and BOND joined the round, alongside continued support from BroadLight, NFDG, Valor Capital, AMP Coalition, and Smash Capital. Additional strategic partnerships are expected to be announced later in February.
And then there's Nvidia. Co-founder Mati Staniszewski confirmed that Nvidia invested in the company back in September 2025, adding serious strategic weight to the cap table.
Total funding raised to date now stands at $781 million across five rounds.
Why London Matters
ElevenLabs is headquartered in London, which places it among the most valuable AI companies in Europe. The company sits alongside names like Synthesia (which recently raised $200M at a $4 billion valuation) in making London a genuine contender in the global AI race.
The timing matters too. European AI startups collectively raised a record $21.6 billion in 2025, according to Dealroom. The UK in particular has attracted over £45 billion in committed AI investment, establishing itself as the continent's undisputed AI hub.
ElevenLabs operates with a lean team of roughly 400 employees spread across 14 cities worldwide: London, New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Dublin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bengaluru, Sydney, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, and Mexico City. Each office has locally embedded go-to-market teams supporting enterprise adoption.
What's Next: Agents, Video, and the Path to IPO
The funding isn't just about scaling what already works. ElevenLabs is pushing into new territory on multiple fronts.
On the research side, the company is expanding work on emotional conversational models, dubbing, and what it calls "audio general intelligence." Co-founder Piotr Dąbkowski put it plainly: the team is building foundational models across the full audio stack, from text-to-speech and transcription to music, dubbing, and conversational AI.
The company is also doubling down on ElevenAgents, its conversational agents platform designed for customer experience, revenue teams, and internal operations. Staniszewski signalled plans to expand beyond voice entirely, incorporating video through a recent partnership with LTX, and building agents that can talk, type, and take action.
New product updates are rolling out in the coming days, including a faster, more emotionally expressive conversational model and a new orchestration layer for more natural turn-taking in conversations.
And the elephant in the room? An IPO. Staniszewski has stated openly that ElevenLabs is building towards going public, with speculation pointing to a 2027 or 2028 timeline.
What This Means for UK Founders
A few things stand out here for anyone building a startup in the UK.
Focus wins. Unlike the big tech companies where voice is just one feature among many, ElevenLabs went all-in on audio. Their entire research effort and product roadmap revolves around it. That singular focus is clearly resonating with investors.
Revenue matters more than ever. $330 million ARR at a four-year-old company is exceptional. If you're preparing your pitch deck, understand that the bar has shifted. Investors want to see real traction, real enterprise adoption, and a clear path to profitability.
London is competing globally. ElevenLabs chose London as its headquarters over Silicon Valley. That decision, combined with record-breaking AI startup investment in the UK, should give every founder building here a shot of confidence.
The voice AI market is massive. For decades, humans adapted to machines by clicking buttons and navigating menus. ElevenLabs is betting that the future is the reverse: machines that adapt to humans through natural voice interaction. If you're building in this space, the market is clearly being validated at scale.
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