Wedoany.com Report on Feb 6th, the startup ElevenLabs Inc., which focuses on developing artificial intelligence models for voice generation and transcription, recently announced that it has successfully raised $5 billion in a late-stage funding round. This Series D financing was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from several investment institutions including Andreessen Horowitz, Iconiq, and Lightspeed. This capital injection brings the company's valuation to $11 billion, more than triple its $3.3 billion valuation from January of last year.
The significant increase in valuation reflects the substantial sales growth of this voice AI technology provider. Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs' current client base includes several well-known technology companies such as Meta Platforms Inc. and Nvidia Corporation, with annualized revenue exceeding $330 million. Notably, Nvidia Corporation is also one of the company's investors.
In terms of technology products, ElevenLabs launched its latest voice AI model, Eleven v3, last month. This model supports synthetic voice generation in over 70 languages and can simulate non-verbal reactions. Users can interact with the model by inputting text scripts and can also fine-tune the output using audio label data snippets. The company also offers more than six other models, including Eleven v2.5 Turbo as a faster alternative to Eleven v3. This model can generate speech nearly in real-time, suitable for application scenarios requiring rapid responses, such as customer support assistants. Another voice transcription algorithm, Scribe v2, can understand over 90 languages.
These voice AI models are all made available to developers via an application programming interface and can be embedded into various types of software. Simultaneously, the company provides two cloud services, ElevenAgents and ElevenCreative, aimed at simplifying the technical process of integrating voice processing functionalities into applications. The ElevenAgents service helps businesses create AI voice assistants for tasks like handling customer support requests, offering an integration library with over 400 connectors and a drag-and-drop customization interface. The ElevenCreative service is optimized for content generation scenarios. Marketers can use it to create background music for commercials and, through integration with third-party AI models, achieve functionalities like generating images and videos from text prompts.
Co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski stated, "We plan to expand the Creative product line to help creators combine high-quality audio with video and assistant features, while also assisting enterprises in building intelligent assistants capable of speaking, typing, and acting." In the future, this London-based voice AI company plans to continuously enhance the technical value by developing new artificial intelligence models and further expand its business coverage in the more than ten international markets it has already entered.
