ElevenLabs announces $100 million employee tender offer at $6.6 bn valuation

Leading voice AI research and deployment company ElevenLabs has announced a $100 million employee tender offer at a valuation of $6.6 billion. The tender, led by existing investors Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Smash Capital, World Innovation Lab, and others, provides liquidity for employees while reinforcing long-term alignment as the company continues to scale.

ElevenLabs, founded in 2022, surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue earlier this year and expects to top $300 million by year-end, with enterprise revenue growing more than 200% over the past year. Its conversational AI agent platform claims to have created over 2 million agents across web, phone, and apps, powering use cases from customer support and scheduling to education and entertainment. The company's recent launches include the expressive Eleven v3 text-to-speech model and Eleven Music, a tool for generating studio-grade music from natural language prompts.

“The uniquely strong support of our investors and the deep commitment of our team will allow us to continue innovating and delivering more exceptional products for our customers. That team now consists of over 330 talented individuals, up from 70 just one year ago. Having the right people on board is essential to achieving our mission of making interactions with technology as natural as those with people. Our work is just getting started. Voice is the future interface, and we are building to ensure that ElevenLabs continues to be the voice of technology," says Mati Staniszewski, Co-Founder at ElevenLabs.

ElevenLabs' list of clients includes the likes of Cisco, Epic Games, Adobe, and NVIDIA. In India, the company has seen a significant growth in the audio AI space, where its fast-growing local team is fuelling adoption across technology and automotive to media and entertainment.

In the past year, ElevenLabs' local GTM team partnered with some of the country’s most innovative brands, including Meesho, Apna, 99acres, TVS Motors, Mahindra, and PocketFM, to power conversational AI and customer engagement at scale. The company says that with demand accelerating, India has rapidly become one of ElevenLabs’ most strategic growth markets, and the company is expanding its presence and partnerships to further strengthen its leadership in the region.

"Our strategy (for India) is to be both a global and local player. We support 32 languages in text-to-speech and 99 languages in speech-to-text, including Indian languages. We are focused on providing scalable AI models tailored for India’s multilingual landscape. Additionally, we have a pricing model that suits a wide range of customers, from individuals to large enterprises. We are also investing locally in research, partnering with regional voice actors to build a diverse voice library,"  Siddharth Srinivasan, GTM (Go-To-Market), India, ElevenLabs, told Fortune India earlier.

Srinivasan said the company's focus is on expanding the voice dataset and refining models to better represent the unique tonalities and cultural nuances of Indian languages. "India’s linguistic diversity requires us to be multilingual and multi-accent-capable. Even within Hindi, for example, multiple regional variations must be accounted for. Our voice marketplace has over 5,000 voices, allowing users to find regionally accurate speech models."

He said the challenge lies in maintaining quality across different languages and accents while ensuring the voices sound natural and expressive.