Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, speaking on a panel with Andrew Reed, partner at Sequoia, at AI Ascent 2026, in San Francisco, on April 20, 2026. (Credit: Screenshot from a YouTube video published by the Sequoia Capital channel)
BEIRUT — The London start-up ElevenLabs, specializing in AI-generated voices, has joined the ranks of the world’s most highly valued AI labs after a share sale doubled its valuation to $22 billion, the Financial Times (FT) reported. Its venture capital arm, FT Ventures, is among the company's investors.
Existing investors and company employees, who develop software capable of generating realistic voices, sold $300 million worth of shares in a secondary transaction led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price, according to the FT. The newspaper adds that the deal, which values ElevenLabs at $22 billion, places the company among the 10 most highly valued AI labs outside of China, based on an FT analysis of Dealroom data, as AI sector transactions accelerate rapidly in private markets.
This new valuation is double that of its previous primary funding round in February, when the company raised $500 million from Silicon Valley venture capital funds including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Iconiq, as well as FT Ventures.
The deal puts ElevenLabs at a valuation level comparable to that of France’s Mistral, which in September raised 3 billion euros in the largest ever private tech funding in Europe, for a valuation of 21 billion euros ($24 billion).
Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs, told the FT that this secondary transaction allowed the company to attract “long-term institutional investors,” including Goldman Sachs and Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC, while also helping in the fierce competition to recruit and retain AI researchers.
The ElevenLabs management also sold a “small amount” of employee-held shares, Staniszewski said, after receiving “so many buyout offers over the years,” the FT adds. He declined to say whether he himself had sold shares as part of this transaction.
'We want to go public'
“We want to build for the long term ... We’d like to be ready to go public in the next two or two and a half years. Whether we’ll actually do so depends on so many other factors,” he said.
Present in 20 countries, ElevenLabs was founded by Staniszewski and his Polish compatriot Piotr Dąbkowski in 2022, when the company was valued at $9 million. Electronics giant Nvidia became a strategic investor in 2025. Deutsche Telekom and KPN, the Ukrainian and Greek governments, as well as fintech groups Stripe, Revolut, and Klarna are among its major clients.
This secondary funding follows the release of the fourth generation of ElevenLabs’ model. According to Staniszewski, it brings a “major improvement,” especially for lengthy conversations.
Unlike many AI software companies, ElevenLabs develops its own models and trains them on its own IT infrastructure, rather than relying on technologies from OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, or on the cloud computing systems of Microsoft or Amazon, the FT also reports. The company works with hyperscalers to make these models available to clients worldwide.