One year tripled! AI voice unicorn ElevenLabs raised another 500 million dollars, skyrocketing to 11 billion in the year.

AI voice generation track welcomes a new "cash cow". Startup ElevenLabs announced on Wednesday that its valuation skyrocketed to $11 billion in a new round of funding, more than doubling its valuation of $3.3 billion a year ago, highlighting the capital market's fervent pursuit of generative AI applications. The $500 million funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, with existing shareholders Andreessen Horowitz Fund, Iconiq Capital, and new investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital, and BOND also participating. Sequoia Capital partner Andrew Reed will join the company's board of directors. Co-founder and CEO Marti Staniszewski said that the funding will be mainly used for technological research and global expansion. The core strategy is to build an enterprise platform that allows customers to use conversational AI applications in customer service, training, sales, and define it as a "key growth engine". The company plans to expand its business in more than ten cities in the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. According to Staniszewski's disclosure on LinkedIn, the company has established partnerships with Deutsche Telekom, food delivery platform Deliveroo, financial technology company Revolut, the Ukrainian government, and more. More information on investors may be announced later this month. Despite being valued at only $3.3 billion in the previous round of funding in early 2025, strong investment demand is evident, as employees were already allowed to sell some of their shares at a valuation of $6.6 billion last year. Currently, technology investors are pouring huge sums of money into the entire AI industry chain, from applications to infrastructure. For example, Anthropic, the developer of the Claude large model, is advancing with a funding of over $20 billion, while planning a secondary market transaction that allows employees to sell shares at a valuation of $350 billion. It is worth noting that ElevenLabs has faced controversy for its technology being misused to create fraudulent deepfake audio. In 2024, a user was banned for creating audio of U.S. President Biden discouraging voters, prompting the company to strengthen its control over technology misuse. Its voice cloning technology stems from the shared vision of founders Staniszewski and former Google machine learning engineer Peter Dabkowski - inspired by poorly dubbed Hollywood films growing up in Poland, they aimed to develop a technology that could realistically narrate movies, audiobooks, and online courses.