en.Wedoany.com Reported - ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski recently stated at the RAISE Summit held at the Louvre in Paris that the company's annualized revenue run rate has approached $600 million, with a valuation of $22 billion. The European voice AI startup achieved $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in just about 20 months, then reached $200 million in approximately 10 months, and went from $200 million to $300 million in only five months. Summit host Jason Calacanis estimated the current annualized revenue run rate at nearly $600 million, a figure Staniszewski did not deny.
In terms of team operations, ElevenLabs maintains a small team structure of 5 to 10 people and has never hired product managers. Engineers are embedded in almost all functions, including legal, talent, and go-to-market, while also building internal automation tools, helping colleagues safely adopt AI, and conducting security checks on all released products. Staniszewski believes voice technology has reached a tipping point, with enterprises and sales teams becoming the main drivers of recent growth, as real-time, interruptible voice agents have become sufficiently reliable.
The application of voice technology exhibits unique characteristics. ElevenLabs collaborates with financial companies like Revolut and Klarna on payment reminder services, finding that users are more honest with AI than with humans, as the sense of shame disappears. Callers share real situations, and communication is more direct, with quicker interruptions. In terms of voice risk control, the company reviews all generated content, checking samples at both voice and text levels to prevent commercial or fraudulent abuse. ElevenLabs has also built a classifier to flag AI-generated audio, whether from its own models or open-source models.
The same technology brings both business opportunities and social value. A creator marketplace allows voice actors to license their voices and profit from them, with Staniszewski stating that the company has paid over $22 million to this community. ElevenLabs has also obtained multilingual licensing for Matthew McConaughey's voice, providing an interactive Darth Vader character for Fortnite through Disney. Additionally, the company helps people who have lost their voices due to illness regain the ability to speak, including a U.S. congresswoman and a bride who renewed her wedding vows.
Facing the risk that model providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google might encroach on its market, Staniszewski emphasized that ElevenLabs adopts a model-agnostic strategy, allowing customers to freely choose models to build voice agents without being locked in. The company's moat lies in the voice layer itself, with research preferences leaning more toward architecture than raw scale. Over 1,000 contractors label its audio data, and industry-specific products, along with the voice and integration ecosystem, form a defensive system. Regarding competitors' constant attempts to extract data, Staniszewski said the company has ways to slow them down while also exploring proprietary models as insurance. He noted that ElevenLabs sends tens of millions of dollars annually to labs trying to replace it, but the company believes controlling the conversation is more important than controlling the model. This European AI startup, one of the most valuable, is partly owned by Poland and led by a Polish founder.
