That’s according to a report Wednesday (Sept. 30) from the Financial Times (FT), which said the startup reached this milestone when a share sale doubled its price tag to $22 billion.
Investors and employees at the London company, which makes realistic speech-generation software, have sold $300 million in stock in a tender led by Wellington and T Rowe Price, the FT report said, adding that this new valuation makes ElevenLabs one of the 10 most valuable AI labs outside China.
ElevenLabs was valued at $11 billion in February when it raised $500 million from a group of Silicon Valley venture capital firms. (The FT acknowledged that its own corporate venture arm is also an investor in ElevenLabs.)
The report notes that this new valuation puts ElevenLabs at a similar level to France’s Mistral, which raised 3 billion euros in Europe’s largest-ever round of private tech funding this month at a valuation of 21 billion euros ($24 billion).
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ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski told the FT that the secondary transaction helped it bring in “long-term institutional investors,” such as Goldman Sachs and Singapore’s GIC sovereign wealth fund, while also helping it hire and retain AI researchers.
“We are competing for talent with the biggest AI labs,” he said. “We need to stay competitive in that market, too. So of course, the secondary offers help with that.”
PYMNTS wrote last month about ElevenLabs’ Iconic Marketplace, a licensing platform connecting brands with the rights holders of history’s most recognizable voices, including those of Mark Twain and Thomas Edison.
ElevenLabs partnered with talent and IP agencies — including CMG Worldwide, which manages the estates of numerous deceased celebrities — to bring voices to the marketplace. While framed as an ethical alternative to unauthorized AI cloning, this consent-based model leaves working voice actors competing economically against licensed historical and iconic synthetic voices, PYMNTS wrote.
“However, that consent only covers one side of the voice-cloning problem: making sure the celebrities and estates who participate get paid and keep approval rights, but it does nothing to stop the same technology from being used without permission elsewhere,” the report said.
Voice cloning now requires only 20 to 30 seconds of audio, while a convincing video deepfake can be constructed in 45 minutes using freely available software, according to the World Economic Forum.
That barrier to entry can be seen in fraud data: PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that 58% of companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue said they had encountered an AI-generated document or deepfake attack in the previous year.
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