ElevenLabs pacing at $600 million ARR, reportedly valued at $22 billion

ElevenLabs, the AI startup that builds text-to-speech voice models, says it’s pacing at $600 million in annual recurring revenue and is now reportedly valued at $22 billion by its backers — despite being just four years old. Co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski discussed the company’s growth, margins, and IPO timing in an interview at the Nrth conference in Toronto, formerly known as Elevate.

More than half of ElevenLabs’ revenue comes from large enterprise customers, Staniszewski said, putting the enterprise share at 55% or more of revenue, with most of the rest split among small and medium businesses, developers, and creators. Clients using its voice technology for customer service include Klarna, which runs first-line phone support for 35 million U.S. customers on ElevenLabs, along with Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Adobe, and a growing list of governments; the company also sells to creators making audiobooks, dubbing, and music.

ElevenLabs increasingly competes with its own customers — Decagon, a conversational-AI platform, trained its voice product on ElevenLabs and now competes with it, Staniszewski said, describing the boundary between model, platform, and application companies as increasingly blurry. Asked about gross margins, he declined to give specifics but said the company doesn’t mind margins narrowing further if it means growing market share: “If we can invest and prove that value, we don’t mind the margins going lower to actually benefit together as the value gets created in the next five years.”

On working with governments, Staniszewski pointed to a healthcare deployment for the Polish government, where AI agents call patients to remind them of appointments in a public health system where 18% never show up; each government deployment uses whichever mix of open-weight, closed-source, or fine-tuned models fits local requirements and data-residency rules. Staniszewski also said businesses should currently disclose when a customer is talking to an AI agent rather than a human, though he expects that norm to shift as AI agents become more common. It has been reported that ElevenLabs is looking at a 2028 IPO; Staniszewski would not confirm the timing, saying only that the company is preparing the foundation to be able to go public in the coming years.

Why it matters

ElevenLabs’ willingness to let margins slide for market share signals it sees voice AI as a land grab, not a mature market — a bet that could pressure smaller rivals racing on price as the biggest voice-AI players start treating scale, not profitability, as the metric that matters.