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ElevenLabs sells software that turns text into realistic human-sounding speech and other audio.
ElevenLabs is an artificial intelligence company that makes voices. Give its software a piece of text and it will read it back out loud in a voice that sounds like a real person, not a robot. People use it for audiobooks, video narration, video games, customer service phone lines, and dubbing movies and shows into other languages. The company is widely credited with helping push AI voice quality from obviously fake to genuinely hard to tell apart from a human recording.
The core product is text-to-speech, but the business has grown into a small family of audio tools. Its voice cloning feature can recreate a person's voice from a short sample, which is powerful and also a little unsettling. It sells dubbing that swaps actors' voices into new languages while trying to keep the original performance intact. It also offers a studio tool for producing long-form audio like audiobooks, and a marketplace where voice actors can license their voices and get paid when others use them. Most customers pay through subscriptions, with free tiers to pull people in and paid plans for creators, small teams, and large enterprises. The company was founded in 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski and Mati Staniszewski, and it grew fast on the back of the generative AI boom. It is private, backed by venture capital, and its investors have valued it at several billion dollars, which makes it one of the more closely watched AI startups. Its headquarters are split between New York and London, and it is a genuinely global business, with customers spread around the world. Being private means there is no stock to buy and no quarterly reports to read, so outsiders mostly learn about it through funding announcements and product launches.
Its biggest challenge is not technology but trust. A tool that can clone almost any voice is a gift to scammers and a headache for everyone else, so the company has had to build safeguards like verification for cloned voices and detection tools for fake audio. It also faces stiff competition from much larger players, including Microsoft, whose Azure speech tools compete for enterprise customers, and a crowd of other AI voice startups. ElevenLabs' bet is that being the best at voice, and the most careful about how it is used, will keep customers coming back.
Saved answer · last researched 4 Nov 2026