ElevenLabs: Spearheading Voice AI with $19 Million Series A Funding
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ElevenLabs, the AI-powered platform renowned for creating synthetic voices, has recently closed a significant funding round. The innovative startup has successfully raised $19 million in a Series A round, and the funding was co-led by entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, along with the renowned venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Among the other participants were prestigious entities like Creator Ventures, SV Angel, and a myriad of notable individuals including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, and Deepmind and Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.
This funding round has catapulted ElevenLabs to a post-money valuation of $99 million, a commendable feat for a startup that was established just over a year ago. The funds secured from this round will be directed towards expanding ElevenLabs’ voice AI research hub and launching additional products tailored for various market verticals.
These include but are not limited to publishing, gaming, entertainment, and conversational applications.
ElevenLabs was conceived by Mati Staniszewski, formerly of Palantir, and Piotr Dabkowski, an ex-Google employee. Their innovative platform leverages AI to convert text into speech, creating synthetic voices, cloned voices, or completely unique “artificial” voices. The technology is language-agnostic, and permits corporate customers to refine and construct their proprietary speech models.
The recent funding round coincided with ElevenLabs launching Projects, a workflow for creating and editing long-form spoken content. This new feature facilitates the generation of dialogue segments and even audiobooks without necessitating leaving the platform.
The technology has extensive applications in sectors like multilingual audiobook creation, voicing digital articles, supporting visually impaired individuals in accessing online written content, and powering AI radio.
Despite its rapid growth and recognition, ElevenLabs has also faced challenges. The platform has been misused for sharing harmful messages impersonating celebrities, and for cloning voices to disseminate threats and hate speech.
In response, ElevenLabs has introduced a set of safeguards to curtail misuse and has launched AI Speech Classifier, a tool designed to detect whether an audio sample contains AI-generated content from ElevenLabs.
However, the platform’s advancement in synthetic voice technology poses an existential threat to voice actors, with AI-generated voices potentially replacing them. Despite these concerns, ElevenLabs remains undeterred, collaborating with publishers and media platforms to generate audio content for audiobooks, video games, and radio content.
Looking forward, ElevenLabs aims to extend its AI models to voice dubbing, enabling the transfer of emotions and intonations from one language to another. The company is already testing this technology with industry partners for AI dubbing at scale.
With a total of $21 million in funding, ElevenLabs is poised to compete in the increasingly crowded generative voice space. Its main competitors include tech giants Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, as well as emerging startups such as Murf, Tavus, Resemble AI, Respeecher, PlayHT, and Lovo.
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