AI voice firm Elevenlabs hits $22bn valuation in fresh boost for UK tech
London-based ElevenLabs has hit a $22bn (£16bn) valuation after completing a $300m employee share sale, marking another sharp jump in value for one of Britain’s fastest-growing AI firms.
The voice AI group’s valuation has doubled since its $11bn Series D in February, when it raised $500m, and is now more than 2,000 times the $9m price tag on its first funding round four years ago.
The tender offer was led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price and allows employees and existing shareholders to sell stock rather than raising fresh cash for the company.
Goldman Sachs, Singapore’s GIC, EQT, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Sapphire Ventures and BDT & MSD invested in Elevenlabs for the first time, alongside existing backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed and Iconiq.
The latest price tag gives a fresh lift to the UKs growing stable of highly valued AI companies, as policymakers seek to keep more of the country’s fastest-growing technology businesses scaling from the UK.
Elevenlabs has grown from an AI voice generator into a wider platform for businesses to deploy conversational agents, which are increasingly driving its revenues.
Enterprise customers now make up 55 per cent of revenue, while annual recurring revenue from Eleven Agents, its conversational AI platform, has more than tripled since February.
Its agents now handle more than 15 million conversations each week, also three times February’s level, across tasks ranging from refunds and insurance renewals to phone upgrades and healthcare bookings.
Customers include Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, Admiral and Doordash-owned Sevenrooms, while the governments of Ukraine and Greece have also rolled out the tech.
Elevenlabs said its products are used in daily operations at five of the world’s 10 largest tech companies, five of the 10 biggest insurers and four of the 10 largest telecoms groups.
“AI should interact with people the way we interact with each other”, co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski said.
“We’re already seeing rapid adoption of expressive voice agents by enterprises and governments”.
UK AI firms pile on value
Elevenlabs’ latest valuation underlines how quickly the value of Britain’s biggest private AI companies is rising.
Research from the Hurun UK Unicorn Index in July valued the country’s nine AI unicorns at more than £40bn combined, with ElevenLabs itself then put at around £8.5bn.
The wider index counted 70 UK companies worth more than $1bn, with a combined value of £228bn, putting Britain behind only the US and China for the number of unicorns.
But the boom has also sharpened questions over whether the UK can turn its most promising startups into large, independent technology companies rather than losing them to overseas buyers or markets.
Only two UK unicorns had floated this year when Hurun published its research in July, compared with 35 in the US, while British pension funds continued to put a far smaller proportion of their assets into venture capital than their North American peers.
Ministers have sought to unlock more domestic capital for fast-growing companies through pension reforms and a proposed £1bn-plus UK Scale-up Fund.
Elevenlabs has itself expanded rapidly overseas. The company now employs more than 800 people and operates across 20 countries, although London remains its largest base.
The company said giving staff liquidity was one reason for the latest tender. “As we grow, it’s important to us to let our people share in some of the value they are creating for our customers and the wider world”, Staniszewski said.
The rise comes as Elevenlabs pushes further beyond the text-to-speech models that first made its name. It has released two new models, Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, while its technology now supports more than 90 languages.