ElevenLabs Doubles to $22B as Voice Agents Take Off

ElevenLabs is now worth $22 billion. The London-based voice AI company announced on Wednesday that it has closed a $300 million tender offer for employees and early shareholders at that price, double the $11 billion it was valued at in its Series D in February. The round was led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price.

A tender offer is not a fundraise in the usual sense. Rather than the company issuing new shares to raise cash, investors buy existing shares from staff and early backers, giving them a way to turn paper wealth into money without waiting for an IPO. That makes the headline number a market price for ElevenLabs stock rather than a war chest. It also brought in a notable list of first-time investors: EQT, Goldman Sachs, Singapore’s GIC, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Sapphire Ventures and BDT & MSD, alongside existing backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, ICONIQ, D.E. Shaw and Alkeon.

The reason for the jump is agents. ElevenLabs started out as a text-to-speech tool, but its growth now comes from ElevenAgents, a platform for building phone and chat agents that talk to customers. Those agents handle more than 15 million conversations a week, three times the volume in February, and the product’s annual recurring revenue has also tripled over the same period. Businesses now account for 55% of total revenue. According to Reuters, the agents are being used for tasks such as processing refunds, renewing insurance policies and booking appointments. The company says its technology is deployed at five of the ten biggest tech companies, five of the ten biggest insurers and four of the ten biggest telecom operators.

“We’re already seeing rapid adoption of expressive voice agents by enterprises and governments,” chief executive Mati Staniszewski told Reuters. In the company’s own announcement he put the goal more simply: “AI should interact with people the way we interact with each other.” Staniszewski founded the company in 2022 with Piotr Dabkowski. It now has more than 800 employees, and its models speak, listen and translate in over 90 languages.

The product line has filled out quickly this year, with the Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo speech models and Scribe v2 Medical, a transcription model aimed at clinical notes. ElevenLabs says the next phase is industry-specific agents and deeper enterprise deployment. The competition is getting heavier, though: OpenAI, Google and Meta all sell real-time voice models of their own, and every big model lab now pitches voice as the default interface for agents. ElevenLabs’ bet is that being the specialist, with the most natural voices and the most languages, is worth more than being one feature among many. At $22 billion, investors are paying for that bet to keep working.