Organisation
ElevenLabs
A voice-AI company whose tools generate realistic synthetic speech and can clone a voice from a short sample, used for narration, dubbing and conversational agents.
ElevenLabs is a voice-AI company, founded in 2022, whose tools generate realistic synthetic speech and can clone a person's voice from a short sample. It became one of the most prominent firms in generative audio — used for narration, dubbing and conversational agents — but the same cloning ability drew misuse almost immediately: within days of its 2023 public beta, users produced abusive audio in celebrities' voices, and the company has since added identity checks and made safety part of its pitch. Its valuation climbed quickly, reaching $3.3 billion in a January 2025 funding round and rising further over the following year. In early 2026 it began a research partnership with the UK's AI Security Institute on how well people can detect synthetic voices and how a voice shapes trust, as voice-cloning fraud became a documented risk.
- Category
- Generative media
- Founded
- 2022
- HQ
- London, UK
- Funding
- $3.3bn valuation (Jan 2025 Series C); reportedly raised further later in 2025
- Key people
- Mati Staniszewski, Piotr Dąbkowski
Appears alongside
Featured in threads
Tracks
- Security & misuse 2
- Money & business 2
- Models & capabilities 1
- Culture & impact 1
UK AISI and ElevenLabs launch voice-AI security research partnership
The partnership sets out to study two open questions rather than report findings: how well people spot synthetic voices in live conversation, and how a voice's perceived identity shapes trust.
Security & misuse
ElevenLabs raises $180M Series C at $3.3B valuation
The round, co-led by a16z and ICONIQ Growth, tripled ElevenLabs' valuation within a year and brought its total funding to roughly $281M.
Money & business
ElevenLabs raises $19M Series A
The round valued the company at $99M; alongside it, ElevenLabs launched a free tool letting anyone check whether audio was generated with its own voice models.
Money & business · Models & capabilities
4chan users abuse ElevenLabs voice cloning to generate celebrity hate speech
Users of the imageboard cloned Joe Rogan, Emma Watson and Ben Shapiro to produce racist and transphobic audio, days after the tool's public beta opened.
Security & misuse · Culture & impact