- AI company Eleven Labs has raised $19 million in new funding, confirming previous insider reports.
- Eleven Lab uses artificial intelligence to generate realistic voice recordings of written text.
- Venture capitalists invested $25 billion in AI startups in the first quarter alone.
As venture capital investors flock to back companies in the generative AI space, year-old AI voice startup Eleven Labs has raised $19 million in early-stage funding.
The London and New York-based startup, founded in 2022, uses AI to create compelling text-to-speech narrations, dub voices into different languages, and replicate existing voices.
Eleven Labs’ Series A round was co-led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and entrepreneur Daniel Gross, confirming previous insider reports.
Additional support from prominent angels, including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman, and Oculus VR co-founder Brendan Iribe.
Eleven Labs is exploring multiple use cases for technology that can clone speech and achieve high levels of speech quality that mimic human intonation.
Co-founder and CEO Matty Staniszewski previously told an insider that the startup sees great potential in the publishing and audiobook space.
“There will be a big set of tools for independent publishers, authors and newsletter writers who rely on long-form to tell their stories,” Staniszewski said.
Since launching its beta platform in January 2023, the company claims to have 1 million users and has been generating audio content for over a decade.
With the funding injection, the startup will focus on offering long-form video content, launching “projects”, workflows created to edit long-form audio content.
Eleven Labs also released a new AI voice classifier. This allows users to detect if an audio sample contains AI-generated audio from their own platform. The company is currently preparing to release an AI dubbing tool later this year that will allow users to dub audio into different languages while preserving the original user’s voice.
The startup received media attention in January when its technology was used by users on the 4chan forum to mimic celebrity voices.
Credo Ventures and Concept Ventures, which backed the company’s $2 million pre-seed round, also participated in the new round.
