AI startup ElevenLabs reaches unicorn status with $80 million in Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, riding the generative AI wave.
ElevenLabs, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, has achieved unicorn status following its most recent round of funding, as rising investor interest in generative AI technology drives up startup valuations.
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Prominent investors Nat Friedman, a former CEO of GitHub, and businessman Daniel Gross co-led the venture. Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Smash Capital, BroadLight Capital, and Credo Ventures also participated. After receiving a $100 million valuation in June, ElevenLabs has now raised $101 million in total, valuing the business at over $1 billion.
Voice AI startup ElevenLabs gains unicorn status after latest fundraising -source#ElevenLabs #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Startup #TechNews #UnicornStatus #VentureCapital #SeriesBFunding pic.twitter.com/aQEuMMxVUP
— Market Moon (@MarketMoon53397) January 22, 2024
The mission of ElevenLabs, consequently, according to CEO and co-founder Mati Staniszewski, is to “transform how we interact with content by breaking down language and communication barriers.” In order “to enable everyone to connect with information and stories that matter,” he continued, the London-based voice cloning company aims to develop state-of-the-art technology that will make content accessible across languages and voices.
Voice AI startup ElevenLabs gains unicorn status after latest fundraising https://t.co/shtO3qzP1N #ai #artificialintelligence #genai pic.twitter.com/jWBcDX46hK
— Milo Camacho (@milocamj) January 22, 2024
ElevenLabs raises $80 million
ElevenLabs announced on Monday, Jan. 22, that it had secured $80 million in Series B funding from a group of investors. The group of investors subsequently included Sequoia Capital, entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, and venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz.
The two-year-old company was valued at $1.1 billion in the funding round, making it a unicorn, or billion-dollar startup. The company did not reveal its valuation.
According to data from PitchBook, that represents a significant increase from the $100 million valuation in its previous funding round. This was made in anticipation of a boom in the use of AI voice generation by a variety of businesses, including video game companies and film studios.
More about ElevenLabs
The London-based company, in addition, has created AI models and tools that enable the creation of voices with a variety of languages, accents, and emotions. As a result, about 40 remote workers are employed by it globally, and by year’s end, its CEO, Mati Staniszewski, said it plans to grow to 100.
The voice AI company said that businesses like Storytel, Paradox Interactive, and The Washington Post are among its expanding clientele, in addition to independent content producers.
ElevenLabs is being used by political campaign staff, however, in the US to connect with non-native English-speaking voters, according to Staniszewski.
Staniszewski says we’ll see more AI content across social media campaigns. The key primitive, however, is to make sure that people are aware that it’s AI. They are big proponents of being able to detect AI content and trace it back,” said Staniszewski.
One of its tools, the AI Speech Classifier, aids in the identification of audio content produced by AI. It additionally produces dubbing products for motion pictures and is creating a marketplace where users can create artificial intelligence voices and earn money by licensing them.
The startup faces competition from other AI firms, such as OpenAI, whose ChatGPT made generative AI widely known. Significantly, last year, the Microsoft-backed startup launched competing text-to-speech products.
Azure AI Speech で新たな男性の多言語音声と自動言語検出が加えられました。 Azure AI text-to-speech released new multilingual voices supporting 41 languages and accent with auto language detection enabled https://t.co/Vue5lAyLHL
— ともなり (@tomonari_q) August 9, 2023
Staniszewski remarked, concurrently, that the primary distinction, in his opinion, is that they aim to develop both the workflow layer and the research. And this is the main focus for them.
ElevenLabs, moreover, reported in 2023 that during its beta phase, it discovered an “increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases.”
Thank you everyone for your advice. We love what you’re creating, but a set of actors use our tech for malicious purposes. We decided to take the following steps to address the issues:
— ElevenLabs (@elevenlabsio) January 31, 2023
The business consequently declared that it would implement more security measures to halt the spread of deepfake voices. Since “nearly all of the malicious content was generated by free, anonymous accounts,” they claimed, this included a $5 monthly subscription that required a credit card to sign up.
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