ElevenLabs, an Anglo-US developer of artificial intelligence (AI) text-to-speech software, has raised US$19mln (£14.9mln) at a valuation of almost US$100mln just over a year after being founded.
With software designed to generate realistic voices in a variety of languages the company launched its first ‘beta’ version of its platform in January, after being founded in May last year, and said it has grown to over a million users in the creative, entertainment and media sectors.
This is in between the 2.5 months and 10 months for Instagram and Facebook respectively, though nowhere near as fast as ChatGPT, crossed a million users in only five days.
The ‘series A’ funding round will be used to continue building its research hub to launch additional products to support specific market verticals such as publishing, gaming, entertainment, and conversational applications, the company said.
Leading the fundraising were noted tech investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, along with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is taking a board seat.
There was also participation from Credo Ventures, Concept Ventures, and various angel investors including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus VR co-founder Brendan Iribe, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, Creator Ventures, SV Angel, Embark Studios, Storytel and TheSoul Publishing.
The company said it was also launching a production workflow tool for editing and creating “dynamic, long-form spoken content”, allowing publishers and independent authors to “seamlessly generate entire dialogue segments, news articles, and even audiobooks without leaving the platform”.
Building on recent product developments, which also include an authentication tool that enables users to upload audio samples and see if they were generated with ElevenLabs, the company said it looking to release an AI dubbing tool that will enable videos to be dubbed into “any language in an engaging, effective, and scalable way” but still using the original speaker’s voice.
This tool is already being worked on with some industry partners.
ElevenLabs was launched by Poland-born Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, who say as childhood friends there were “inspired by the poor voiceovers of American movies they watched growing up in their native Poland, the pair set about designing a platform that could eliminate the linguistic barriers of content”.
The company is incorporated in the US and has an office in London.