From Childhood Frustration to Voice AI Disruption: The ElevenLabs Story

As they pursued higher education—Mati studying at Imperial College and working in Palantir-type environments; Piotr studying machine learning, formerly at Google—they each developed deep technical chops and exposure to industry challenges. Piotr's work included ML and image detection; Mati grew in deployment strategy.

They asked a simple, powerful question: "What if we could build voice generation that preserves emotion and authentic tone across languages?" Their childhood annoyance turned into a professional mission. That question became the foundation of ElevenLabs, which was co-founded in 2022.

Building the Technical Base: Skills, Stealth, Early Focus

From the outset, Mati and Piotr understood that speech synthesis is not just about converting text to voice—it's about preserving emotional richness, naturalness, and human "breathing" in speech. They spent a good part of their early phase in stealth mode, refining their models, building infrastructure, and testing audio quality—before launching broadly.

Their backgrounds helped. Piotr's ML experience at Google gave him exposure to scalable models and real-world engineering; Mati's strategy work taught him how to think about product deployment, market, ethics, and user needs. Together, they paired technical excellence with user empathy.

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First Versions, First Users: Going Public

Around early 2023, ElevenLabs released its beta version. Users were drawn by quality—voices that felt closer to real human speech, supporting multiple languages, preserving tone and emotional nuance. Early adoption came from content creators, media companies, and publishers.

They also built tools not just for text-to-speech but also voice cloning, AI-dubbing (translating speech into other languages while maintaining expressiveness), and a voice library of expressive voices. The product began to address problems creators had long complained about: monotone voiceovers, lack of emotion, and rigid or robotic sound.

Growth, Funding, and Becoming a Unicorn

ElevenLabs didn't stay small.

• They raised a $2 million pre-seed round in early 2023.
• In mid-2023, they secured a Series A (~$19 million), valuing the company strongly.
• By early 2024, they raised $80 million in Series B, which pushed their valuation over $1 billion, making them a unicorn in the AI voice space.
  

Revenue growth has been impressive: as of late 2024 / 2025, reports show ARR (annual recurring revenue) of approx $200 million, fast expansion in user base, and increasing adoption among creators, media companies, and enterprises.

What They Built: Products & Innovation

ElevenLabs' product suite includes:

• Voice Cloning: creating voices that imitate style and tone from a small sample of voices.
• AI-Dubbing: translate speech to several languages and retain emotional cadence and voice identity.
• Multilingual support: dozens of languages supported, creating localization opportunities.
• Guardrails & safety features: including an AI Speech Classifier to detect misuse, ensure ethics, and mitigate risks like deepfake abuse.

Values, Leadership & Vision

The leadership of Mati and Piotr exemplifies the dedication to several tenets that are central to their work:

• Ethical and Responsible AI: They take their commitment to investing in safety, detecting misuse of technologies, and being transparent about the generative process seriously.
• Growing from Poland, Thinking Global: Though they are Polish, they built a platform serving creators globally, with operations spanning multiple geographies. Mati has spoken publicly about wanting to develop opportunities in Poland for domestic AI talent.
• User-first & Quality-first: Instead of rushing to market, they spent time refining voice quality, tone, latency, and fidelity before releasing widely. That attention has paid off.

Challenges & Turning Points

Their journey has not been without hurdles.

• The technical difficulty of generating high-quality, emotional, multilingual voice content is non-trivial. It requires large computing, expert model architecture, and constant iteration.
• The ethical concerns are real: voice cloning and dubbing can be misused. ElevenLabs has had to build in guardrails, detection, and transparency proactively.
• Scaling both enterprise and consumer sides: balancing user demand, monetization, licensing, and keeping voice tech accessible has been a strategic tightrope.

Turning points included their public beta launch (letting creators test), major funding rounds (enabling infrastructure scale), and adoption by media/publishers to repurpose content across languages. These pivots expanded both scope and credibility.

Why Mati & Piotr Matter

• Bridge between culture and tech: They took cultural friction (bad dubbing) and transformed it into global tech innovation.
• Talent representation: They show that world-class AI product companies can be built from outside Silicon Valley—Polish founders raising unicorn valuations, serving global customers.
• Setting new audio standards in speech synthesis, voice cloning, and emotion-preserving dubbing. Their output is helping reshape what creators expect from human-like voice AI.
• Ethical leadership: Not just advancing capabilities, but also thinking deeply about misuse, safety, and social impact.
  

The Road Ahead

Looking forward, the vision for ElevenLabs includes:

• Expanding language support further, especially for underrepresented languages.
• Improving voice cloning tools such that tiny voice samples suffice, with high fidelity.
• Deeper tools for audio creators: longer-form content, synchronizing dubbed video, improving latency, UI, and user workflows.
• Building partnerships in content, media, and education to distribute voice AI more broadly.
• Investing in safety, e.g., detection of AI-generated content, watermarking, and ensuring misuse prevention.

Voice as the Next Frontier

Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski didn't just build a product—they built a movement. From two friends annoyed by bad dubbing to founders of a voice AI unicorn in just a few years, they show how clarity in vision, plus technical depth, plus ethical awareness, can lead to disproportionate impact.

ElevenLabs is more than a company—it's changing how we think about voice, language, identity, and content. Its story matters because it proves that technology, when created with purpose and care, can give voice (literally) to culture, emotion, and connection across borders.