The voice cloning company ElevenLabs secures $80 million in funding and attains a valuation of over $1 billion

ElevenLabs, a startup specializing in AI-powered voice cloning tools, recently completed an $80 million Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $101 million and its valuation to over $1 billion. The investment, supported by well-known firms and entrepreneurs, will help ElevenLabs expand its product development, infrastructure, and team, as well as enhance AI research and safety. Co-founded by veterans from Google and Palantir, the company emerged from the founders’ desire to improve upon poorly dubbed films. Today, ElevenLabs offers a speech generation app that provides realistic voice synthesis and is expanding its technology for use in audiobooks, film dubbing, gaming, and marketing. Despite its success, the company has faced criticism for instances of misuse of its technology on platforms like 4chan and concerns over the potential impact on the voice acting industry. In response, ElevenLabs has improved its terms of service and developed detection tools to combat abuse. To address industry concerns, ElevenLabs is developing a marketplace that compensates creators when their voices are used, although currently, the payment is in service credits, not cash. With plans to grow its team, ElevenLabs is positioned as a major player in the competitive synthetic voice market.