# ElevenLabs

> **TL;DR.** ElevenLabs is a voice AI company that builds text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice cloning, and voice-agent infrastructure used by developers, publishers, and enterprises.

- **Category:** AI / Voice & Audio / Synthesis
- **Stage:** established
- **Age:** 1232 days
- **Origin date:** 2023-01-31
- **First detected:** 2026-04-20
- **Canonical URL:** https://earlyterms.com/term/elevenlabs
- **Sources:** 7 primary URLs

## Definition

ElevenLabs is a voice AI company that builds text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice cloning, and voice-agent infrastructure used by developers, publishers, and enterprises. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google engineer Piotr Dabkowski and ex-Palantir PM Mati Staniszewski, it now runs at a $330M ARR and a $11B valuation.

On [Feb 4, 2026 it closed a $500M Series D led by Sequoia](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/04/elevenlabs-raises-500m-from-sequioia-at-a-11-billion-valuation/) at an $11B valuation, more than tripling a year prior. The current slate drives the momentum: [Scribe v2 Realtime STT](https://elevenlabs.io/blog/scribe-v2-realtime-in-elevenlabs-agents) at 150ms latency, [Conversational AI 2.0](https://elevenlabs.io/blog/conversational-ai-2-0), the Eleven v3 Conversational TTS, and the [11.ai](https://the-decoder.com/elevenlabs-launches-11ai-a-voice-assistant-that-uses-mcp-to-integrate-with-digital-workflow-tools/) MCP voice assistant.

## Example

Indie AI subtitle workflows feed Scribe's word-level timestamps plus speaker diarization into Gemini to cut videos — compressing a full film down to a ~12KB structured transcript the model can reason over, instead of burning 45M tokens on raw frames. The same STT rails now power IBM watsonx Orchestrate voice agents in the enterprise.

## Analogy

Think of it as the AWS of voice: one account gets you a studio mic, a transcriber, a live translator, and a voice agent line.

## Why it's emerging now

ElevenLabs closed a $500M Sequoia-led Series D at $11B in Feb 2026 on $330M ARR, then shipped Scribe v2 Realtime (150ms STT), Eleven v3 Conversational TTS, and the 11.ai MCP voice assistant within two quarters. IBM embedded the stack into watsonx Orchestrate in March.

## Related terms

- *child:* Scribe v2
- *child:* 11.ai
- *child:* Eleven v3
- *child:* Conversational AI 2.0
- *parent:* voice cloning
- *competitor:* Deepgram
- *competitor:* OpenAI Whisper
- *competitor:* Cartesia
- *competitor:* gemini-3-1-flash-tts
- *related:* model-context-protocol
- *related:* voice agents
- *related:* TTS

## Sources

1. [ElevenLabs — Series D announcement](https://elevenlabs.io/blog/series-d)
2. [TechCrunch — $500M Series D at $11B](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/04/elevenlabs-raises-500m-from-sequioia-at-a-11-billion-valuation/)
3. [ElevenLabs — Scribe v2 Realtime in Agents](https://elevenlabs.io/blog/scribe-v2-realtime-in-elevenlabs-agents)
4. [The Decoder — 11.ai launch](https://the-decoder.com/elevenlabs-launches-11ai-a-voice-assistant-that-uses-mcp-to-integrate-with-digital-workflow-tools/)
5. [IBM Newsroom — ElevenLabs + watsonx Orchestrate](https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-03-25-enterprise-ai-finds-its-voice-elevenlabs-and-ibm-bring-premium-voice-capabilities-to-agentic-ai)
6. [HN — Conversational AI 2.0 thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44152926)
7. [Wikipedia — ElevenLabs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElevenLabs)

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