ElevenLabs has closed one of the largest funding rounds of early 2026, securing $500 million in a Series D round led by Sequoia Capital. The investment values the London-based startup at $11 billion post-money, more than tripling its valuation from January 2025, when it raised $180 million at $3.3 billion.
Sequoia partner Andrew Reed is joining the company’s board as part of the deal. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Capital significantly increased their stakes, quadrupling and tripling their positions, respectively, while new participants include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital, and BOND. Continued backing came from BroadLight Capital, NFDG, Valor Capital Group, AMP Coalition, Smash Capital, and others, with additional strategic partners expected to be announced later this month.
The round brings ElevenLabs’ total funding to $781 million since its founding in 2022 by Polish entrepreneurs Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski. The company, which specializes in generative voice AI, including realistic text-to-speech, voice cloning, and conversational agents, has seen explosive growth. It closed 2025 with more than $330 million in annual recurring revenue, driven largely by enterprise adoption across customer service, media production, gaming, and content creation.
ElevenLabs’ trajectory reflects the broader market’s appetite for AI infrastructure plays that deliver tangible scale. From a $1.1 billion valuation following an $80 million Series B in early 2024, through a secondary tender offer at $6.6 billion in September 2025, the company’s valuation has climbed rapidly on the back of product momentum and revenue traction. Its ElevenAgents platform, which combines voice and chat capabilities for large-scale operations, has become a key driver for enterprise clients seeking multimodal AI solutions.
The capital will fuel further expansion of its agent platform, global infrastructure, including new offices in Bengaluru, London, and New York, and deeper R&D into more expressive, controllable audio models. CEO Mati Staniszewski has indicated the company is building toward a potential initial public offering, though no timeline has been shared.
Investor confidence stems from ElevenLabs’ ability to differentiate in a crowded voice AI landscape. While Big Tech players like OpenAI, Google, and Amazon continue to advance their own speech models, ElevenLabs has carved out a niche with high-fidelity, customizable voices that support dozens of languages and emotional nuance. Strategic backers such as Nvidia (which participated in a prior round), Salesforce Ventures, Deutsche Telekom, and others underscore its positioning as foundational infrastructure for audio-driven applications.
Yet the $11 billion mark also invites scrutiny. Voice AI remains competitive, with questions lingering around long-term defensibility against commoditization, ethical concerns over deepfake misuse, data sourcing for training models, and pricing sustainability as enterprises scale deployments. ElevenLabs has emphasized safeguards like watermarking and content moderation, but the sector’s regulatory landscape continues to evolve.
This funding arrives amid a still-hot AI investment climate, where infrastructure and applied AI companies with strong revenue signals command premium multiples. ElevenLabs’ path, from a research-focused startup to a revenue-generating unicorn valued at Spotify-like levels, highlights how quickly certain verticals in generative AI can mature when product-market fit aligns with massive enterprise demand.
For now, the round positions ElevenLabs as one of the most valuable private AI companies globally, signaling that voice remains a high-stakes frontier in the race to make AI interactions feel truly human. Whether it sustains this momentum toward an eventual public debut will depend on execution in a field moving at breakneck speed.
