Companies who want to integrate the voice to their products are hurrying to collaborate with Elevenlabs, the startup that develops synthetic vocal technologies such as voice cloning and dubbing tools. Now Elevenlabs is increasing the volume of your business with a huge increase in Serie C, just one year after a considerable series B.
The New York startup closed a 250 million dollar series with an evaluation between 3 and 3.3 billion dollars, they tell Techcrunchi different sources. The round is led by Iconiq Growth, said several people. Andreessen Horowitz, one of the main investors in the 80 million dollar Serie B in January 2024, was another name mentioned as a potential investor in this round. Elevenlabs, Iconiq Growth and AndreeSsen Horowitz did not respond to our commentary request.
For months, the investors hurried to invest in Elevenlabs after a successful growth period for the company, with its audio technology used everywhere, Techcrunch was the first to report in October.
In the wake of a strong business channel, the sources tell us that Elevenlabs was initially looking for funding with an evaluation of 4 billion dollars. But an evaluation of 3 billion dollars is still the triple of the unicorn evaluation that the company reached with the Serie B of a year ago. A source said that the company was preparing to announce the round this month, so the official confirmation could come from one day to the next.
The fundraising of Elevenlabs comes after a few positive years both for the company and for the sector in general. The company was founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski who previously worked respectively at Palantir and Google. Childhood friends originally from Poland, the two were inspired by the poor quality of dubbing in American videos that looked as children and saw the opportunity to use artificial intelligence to develop something better.
Their idea was a clear example of the right idea at the right time. As generative artificial intelligence services have become more advanced, multimedia has come to the limelight and there has been a growing interest in creating applications that include audio and video together with Genai text services.
Elevenlabs released its first beta product in January 2023 and when it collected the 19 million dollar Serie A in June 2023, it had become viral.
Part of this growth did not happen without disputes, with stories of false news created with its technology. But since Elevenlabs has developed a series of detection tools and other safeguard measures to prevent abuse, it emerged as a key partner to enable voice based services for an increasing number of companies.
Its technology, which can be used through an API and available in different levels of use, covers a wide range of use cases: translation of vocal synthesis (in multiple languages), cloning of voices, modification of items in an audio track, creation of completely new voices; together with other vocal editing tools.
Among the customers include other technological platforms such as Syntheisa, the Text-to-Video startup that works with companies and which has itself announced a fundraising of 180 million dollars at the beginning of this month; publishing giants such as Washington Post, Harper Collins and Bertelsmann, who say that 36 companies use Elevenlabs technology in creating content; and game club, among others.
The use led to a rapid increase in sales. In October, sources told us that the annualized recurrent revenues (ARR) of Elevenlabs had grown from $ 25 million in 2023 to 80 million dollars. Two people in November estimated that its ARR was probably closer to 90 million dollars. If the latter figure were accurate, an evaluation of 4 billion dollars would have brought its evaluation multiple to 44 times the ARC; In the end it seems that the agreement has been concluded to a multiple slightly more moderate than 37 times the Arr.
Considering this figure, these are not the most exuberant assessments at the moment: investors seem willing to pay up to 50 times the ARC for the faster growing artificial intelligence companies.
Anysphere, the manufacturer of the popular coding assistant at the cursor, has received numerous unrequited offers for a company value of approximately 2.5 billion dollars, which translates in about 52 times the ARC, reported Techcrunch in November. The company saw its revenues grow from $ 4 million of annualized recurrent revenues (ARR) in April to $ 4 million a month starting last month. (The ARC is commonly calculated by multiplying the latest monthly entries by 12.) However, when the agreement, led by Thrive for an evaluation of 2.5 billion dollars, was announced at the beginning of this month, Anysphere had reached The 100 million dollars in Arr. The New York Times reported it. This implies that the company has been evaluated 25 times Arr.
The most moderate group of Elevenlabs could be a function of the company’s competitors, which include a myriad of startups but also giants such as Google and Openai.
Other past supporters of the company have included Sequoia, I believe Ventures, Concept Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Disney and almost two dozens of Angel Investor high profile.
