Today, ElevenLabs, a pioneering startup focused on developing AI-powered tools for creating and editing synthetic voices, proudly announces the successful closure of an $80 million Series B funding round. This landmark investment was co-led by prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and entrepreneur Daniel Gross. The participation of Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, SV Angel, BroadLight Capital, and Credo Ventures contributed to a total funding of $101 million, elevating ElevenLabs to unicorn status with a valuation exceeding $1 billion.

Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs, revealed that this substantial capital injection would be strategically utilized for product development, expanding the company's infrastructure and team, advancing AI research, and fortifying safety measures to ensure responsible and ethical development of AI technology. Staniszewski emphasized the goal of solidifying ElevenLabs' position as the global leader in voice AI research and product deployment.

Founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski, a former Google machine learning engineer, and Staniszewski, a former Palantir deployment strategist, ElevenLabs entered the scene around a year ago. Known for its browser-based speech generation app, the startup enables users to create lifelike voices with adjustable toggles for intonation, emotion, cadence, and other vocal characteristics. However, ElevenLabs has faced challenges, including the infamous misuse of its tools on platforms like 4chan, where hateful messages mimicking celebrities were shared.

Despite these challenges, ElevenLabs is forging ahead with innovations, expanding into creating audiobooks, dubbing films and TV shows, and generating character voices for games and marketing activations. The company released a "speech to speech" tool last year, preserving a speaker's voice while removing background noise and translating and synchronizing speech for movies and TV shows.

While ElevenLabs has faced criticism, particularly for potential misuse of voices and concerns from voice actors, the startup is proactively addressing these issues. Plans include improving detection tools to flag misuse and partnering with distribution players to make these tools available on third-party platforms. Additionally, ElevenLabs is developing a marketplace for voices, offering compensation to creators for the use of their voices.

As the company plans to grow its team from 40 to 100 by the end of the year, ElevenLabs remains committed to making waves in the fast-growing synthetic voice market, competing against both startups and tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The funding secured in this Series B round positions ElevenLabs as a significant player in shaping the future of AI voice cloning technology.