AI voice startup ElevenLabs raises $500 million at an $11 billion valuation, tripling its worth in just over a year while forging major partnerships with IBM and planning a potential IPO.
In February 2026, ElevenLabs announced a massive $500 million funding round at an $11 billion valuation, led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Iconiq, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Bond. This round more than tripled the $3.3 billion valuation ElevenLabs achieved after its $180 million Series C in January 2025, underscoring the explosive growth trajectory of the voice AI market.
The company's rapid ascent has been fueled by strong enterprise adoption, closing 2025 at $330 million in annual recurring revenue. Major customers now include Deutsche Telekom, Square, the Ukrainian government, and Revolut. In March 2026, ElevenLabs deepened its enterprise play by partnering with IBM to bring its Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text capabilities to IBM watsonx Orchestrate, an agentic AI orchestration platform.
CEO Mati Staniszewski has announced plans for an Initial Public Offering within the next 2–3 years, with consideration of a dual listing on the Warsaw Stock Exchange — a nod to the company's Polish roots. ElevenLabs also launched 11.ai (alpha), a voice assistant that manages daily workflows through voice-first interactions using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), signaling its ambition to move beyond pure TTS into the broader voice agent space.
The funding and partnership announcements confirm a broader industry trend: voice is becoming the next primary interface for enterprise AI. As Staniszewski stated in a TechCrunch interview, 'Voice is the next interface for AI,' a vision increasingly shared by competitors OpenAI and Google, both of which have made voice capabilities central to their next-generation model strategies.
