ElevenLabs funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

ElevenLabs makes AI voices. Its models turn text into speech, transcribe audio, dub video into other languages, and generate music and sound effects. Businesses use them to run voice agents that answer support calls, sell phone plans, and book appointments, while creators use them to narrate audiobooks and videos.

ElevenLabs has raised more than $830 million in equity across five rounds since 2022, from a $2 million pre-seed to a Series D led by Sequoia. That Series D, first announced in February 2026, valued the company at $11 billion. An employee share sale in September 2026 then doubled the price without raising new money for the company.

The company was founded by two Polish friends who grew up watching foreign films with a single flat voice reading every line. Its investors have moved from AI-focused angels to the largest asset managers in the world, plus the telecom companies that now use its agents. Let's dive into ElevenLabs' funding history.

ElevenLabs raised its first four rounds about once a year, each at a much higher price than the last. Since 2026, the pattern has changed: one large Series D kept adding investors, and employee share sales have set the price in between.

Staniszewski, a former Palantir deployment strategist, and Dąbkowski, a former Google machine learning engineer, met as teenagers in Warsaw. They started ElevenLabs in 2022 to fix the dubbing of foreign films in Poland, where one narrator often voices every character.

Credo Ventures, a Prague fund, led the pre-seed, with London's Concept Ventures and a group of European tech angels. ElevenLabs announced the round in January 2023, alongside its first text-to-speech model. The company later said that round valued it at $9 million.

The Series A came five months later. Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, two investors who ran their own AI fund, co-led it with Andreessen Horowitz. Angels included Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.

The Series B in January 2024 made ElevenLabs a unicorn. It came less than two years after founding, a pace in line with how fast AI startups hit unicorn status in that cycle. Sequoia joined the cap table, and the company had about 40 employees at the time.

The Series C in January 2025 tripled the valuation and changed who sat on the cap table. Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Growth co-led it, and five corporate venture arms joined at once: Deutsche Telekom, LG, HubSpot, NTT DOCOMO, and RingCentral.

Most of those strategic investors run large call centers or sell software that talks to customers. They bought in as ElevenLabs was launching a platform for building conversational voice agents. Abu Dhabi's Lunate and the growth fund NEA were among the other new names.

Liberty Global, the European cable and broadband group, added a strategic investment in November 2025. Its announcement also named Dutch telecom KPN's venture arm and Deutsche Telekom's T.Capital as backers, which put several of Europe's largest telecom operators on the cap table.

Sequoia led the Series D in February 2026, and partner Andrew Reed joined the board. Andreessen Horowitz quadrupled its earlier investment and ICONIQ tripled its stake, both buying more than their pro-rata share. Lightspeed, Evantic Capital, and BOND were new.

The round stayed open. In May 2026, ElevenLabs announced a third close that brought in BlackRock, Wellington, D. E. Shaw, and Schroders, along with Nvidia, Salesforce, Santander, KPN, and Deutsche Telekom. Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk joined more than 30 entertainers and athletes, and retail investors got access through the Robinhood Ventures fund.

ElevenLabs did not say how much the later closes added. Tech.eu reported that the Series D passed $550 million. In June, Poland's government took a stake through Vinci, which Bloomberg reported at $11 million, and launched a joint AI Lab Poland program with the company.

ElevenLabs has run three tender offers, in which outside investors buy shares from employees. None of the money goes to the company, so they are not counted in the funding total above.

The first, in September 2025, let staff sell up to $100 million of stock and was led by Sequoia and ICONIQ. A second $100 million tender closed alongside the Series D in May 2026.

The third was the largest. In September 2026, Wellington and T. Rowe Price led a $300 million purchase of employee shares, joined by first-time investors EQT, Goldman Sachs, GIC, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Sapphire Ventures, and BDT & MSD. The company said it wants to give its 800-plus staff regular chances to sell.

ElevenLabs' valuation rose more than 2,000-fold in about four years. The steepest jumps came early, while the later ones have tracked revenue.

The first two rounds each multiplied the valuation about 11 times. After that, the steps shrank to roughly 3 times for the Series C and about 1.7 times between the 2025 tender and the Series D, before the price doubled again in the latest tender.

Revenue explains most of the later climb. ElevenLabs passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), the yearly value of its subscriptions and contracts, about 20 months after founding. It ended 2025 with more than $330 million, and Staniszewski said in September 2026 that ARR was above $600 million.

That puts the $22 billion price at about 37 times current ARR, a little above the multiple the Series D paid on year-end 2025 revenue. The company itself has given two figures for 2025: more than $330 million in February and $350 million in May.

Forbes estimates that each co-founder still owns about 15% of ElevenLabs. Revenue Memo does not yet have a "Who owns ElevenLabs" breakdown, so the rest of the split comes from the round history above: the venture funds that led each round, the strategic investors, and employees.

ElevenLabs' investors fall into three groups. Venture funds led every round, telecom and software companies bought in as customers, and asset managers and celebrities joined in 2026.

Andreessen Horowitz is ElevenLabs' most consistent backer. It co-led the Series A, Series B, and Series C, then quadrupled its investment in the Series D and bought more shares in the September 2026 tender.

Sequoia joined in the Series B, led the first employee tender, and then led the Series D, which gave it a board seat through Andrew Reed. ICONIQ co-led the Series C, co-led the 2025 tender, and tripled its stake in the Series D.

Friedman, a former GitHub CEO, and Gross, a former Apple AI executive, co-led the Series A and Series B and stayed on through their fund NFDG. Their early bet also brought in a network of founder angels, including Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas and Vercel's Guillermo Rauch.

Most of ElevenLabs' strategic investors are also customers. Deutsche Telekom invested in the Series C and again through T.Capital in 2026, and it uses ElevenLabs agents for customer support and for an AI assistant that can join live phone calls. Its reach runs well beyond Germany, given Deutsche Telekom's control of T-Mobile in the US.

NTT DOCOMO, KPN, and Liberty Global give ElevenLabs a foothold with other large carriers. On the software side, Salesforce invested through its venture arm in an earlier round and again in 2026. Its CRM is where many support calls end up, and Salesforce's index-fund-heavy ownership makes it one of the most widely held names on the cap table. HubSpot, a rival CRM with no controlling shareholder, and RingCentral both sell customer-facing software that voice agents can plug into.

LG joined through its technology venture arm, a small position next to LG's family-controlled group. Nvidia's NVentures invested in May 2026. ElevenLabs runs its models on the kind of GPUs that drive Nvidia's data center business, and Nvidia also uses ElevenLabs to localize its own content.

BlackRock, Wellington, D. E. Shaw, Schroders, and T. Rowe Price are public-market investors. Their arrival in 2026 is a common step before an IPO, since it gives the company shareholders that already know how to hold listed stock.

Poland's investment is part funding and part industrial policy. The AI Lab Poland program aims to help Polish AI startups grow, and ElevenLabs plans to expand its Warsaw team.

The celebrity investors have a business reason too. ElevenLabs sells actors and creators a way to license their voices, and it says voice creators on its platform have earned $22 million.

ElevenLabs spends its funding on research, people, and expansion into new countries. It has not disclosed how much it spends on computing power.

ElevenLabs builds its own models rather than licensing them. Its latest text-to-speech models, Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, launched in September 2026 with support for 90 languages, alongside Scribe v2 Medical, a transcription model tuned for healthcare. The Series D announcement named emotional conversational models, dubbing, and "audio general intelligence" as research priorities.

The Series D was raised to sell more of ElevenAgents, the company's platform for voice and chat agents. Those agents now handle more than 15 million conversations a week for customers such as Stripe, Revolut, Square, DoorDash's SevenRooms, and the governments of Ukraine and Greece.

That push has changed how ElevenLabs makes money. Enterprise customers now account for 55% of revenue, with the rest coming from subscriptions paid by creators, small businesses, and developers who use its API.

Headcount has grown from about 40 at the Series B to more than 800 in September 2026. The company is building local sales and engineering teams in more than a dozen cities, including London, New York, Warsaw, Tokyo, Seoul, Bengaluru, and São Paulo, and it has announced expansions in California and Canada.

ElevenLabs has made only small deals. It took on the team behind Omnivore, a read-it-later app, in 2024 to build its ElevenReader app, and it hired the team of Polish voice startup Papla in 2026. Terms for both were not disclosed.

ElevenLabs' growth now comes mainly from large companies and governments. It is building industry versions of its agents for banks, insurers, healthcare providers, retailers, and telecoms, and it says its technology runs at five of the ten largest tech companies and four of the ten largest telecoms. The next step is agents that move between phone, chat, WhatsApp, and email in one conversation.

On the product side, ElevenLabs plans to combine image and video generation with its audio tools for marketing teams, and to keep releasing models such as Eleven v4. Staniszewski has said the company is preparing to go public in the next few years, depending on market conditions, though it has not filed. The $22 billion tender suggests investors will price the next primary round well above the Series D.

The main risks are competition and misuse. Voice is a feature for OpenAI's ChatGPT business and for Google, and customer service agent makers such as Decagon, whose $4.5 billion valuation rests on the same market, now build their own voice products. Voice cloning has also drawn lawsuits from voice actors and scrutiny after researchers linked a 2024 robocall that faked President Biden's voice to ElevenLabs' tools.

ElevenLabs has raised more than $830 million in equity across five rounds since 2022. The company counted $781 million through the first close of its Series D in February 2026, and later closes took that round above $550 million. Employee tender offers worth $500 million are not included because the money went to selling employees.

ElevenLabs' lead investors are Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, ICONIQ, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Credo Ventures. Other backers include Deutsche Telekom, Nvidia, Salesforce, BlackRock, Wellington, T. Rowe Price, Lightspeed, NEA, LG, HubSpot, NTT DOCOMO, KPN, Liberty Global, and the Polish government.

ElevenLabs was valued at $22 billion in a $300 million employee tender offer in September 2026. That was double the $11 billion valuation set by its Series D in February 2026.

No. ElevenLabs is private and has not filed for an IPO. CEO Mati Staniszewski has said the company is building toward a listing in the next few years.

ElevenLabs is owned by its co-founders, employees, and investors. Forbes estimates that Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski each hold about 15%. The largest outside holders are likely Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and ICONIQ, though exact stakes are not public.