ElevenLabs raises $19M Series A

ElevenLabs, a voice-generation start-up that had launched in beta five months earlier, raised a $19 million Series A round co-led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $99 million post-money. Other participants included Creator Ventures, SV Angel and individual investors including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus VR co-founder Brendan Iribe and Mustafa Suleyman, then still at DeepMind.

The company used the announcement to launch three products alongside the funding. Studio offered a production workflow, which the company compared to “a Google Docs level of simplicity,” for turning scripts into long-form audio such as audiobooks and dialogue. Eleven Multilingual extended its speech model to major European languages. Most notably, the AI Speech Classifier let anyone upload an audio clip and check whether it had been generated using ElevenLabs’ own voice-cloning models — a direct response to concerns, already circulating that year, that consumer-grade voice cloning could be used for fraud or disinformation.

The round and the accompanying detector illustrate a pattern that recurred across generative-media start-ups in 2023: rapid fundraising on the strength of a capability that was also drawing scrutiny for potential misuse, paired with a company-built countermeasure aimed at demonstrating the technology could be made accountable rather than pausing its release. ElevenLabs continued to raise at substantially higher valuations in the following years as voice cloning moved from novelty to mainstream production tool.