ElevenLabs has been valued at $22bn following a $300mn employee tender offer, double its valuation at its Series D funding round in February.
The transaction was led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price and gives employees an opportunity to sell shares in the AI voice company. New investors including BDT & MSD, EQT, GIC, Goldman Sachs, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and Sapphire Ventures also took part.
ElevenLabs says growing enterprise use of its conversational AI platform has driven much of its recent expansion, with enterprise customers now accounting for 55% of revenue.
Its ElevenAgents platform allows companies and public bodies to deploy AI agents that can hold voice conversations, connect to internal systems and carry out tasks including customer support, sales and bookings.
The company says its agents now handle more than 15mn conversations a week, three times the level recorded in February. Annual recurring revenue from ElevenAgents has also increased more than threefold over the same period.
Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, SevenRooms, Admiral, Customers Bank and Cadence are among the organisations ElevenLabs says have introduced its agents since its Series D, alongside the governments of Ukraine and Greece.
The technology is being used for tasks including processing refunds and exchanges, renewing insurance policies, upgrading phone plans, booking healthcare appointments and accessing public services.
ElevenLabs co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski said making interaction with AI more natural would affect how widely the technology was adopted.
“AI should interact with people the way we interact with each other,” he said. “We’re already seeing rapid adoption of expressive voice agents by enterprises and governments, who are deploying them in service of consumers and citizens.”
The company says five of the world's ten largest technology companies, five of the ten largest insurers and four of the ten largest telecoms companies now use its technology in their daily operations.
ElevenLabs began in text-to-speech technology but has increasingly expanded into the application layer around its models.
Its ElevenAgents platform can operate across voice, messaging and email, allowing businesses to maintain context as customers move between different channels. ElevenLabs says the number of companies deploying multichannel support through the platform has doubled since February.
The company has also developed versions of its technology for sectors including financial services, healthcare, government, retail and telecoms, with engineers working directly with customers to adapt agents to their systems and requirements.
ElevenLabs says an analysis of customers using its technology found voice agents resolved issues 31% faster on average than chat agents.
T. Rowe Price's Emma Norchet said the combination of ElevenLabs' underlying AI research, products and deployment teams had helped the company improve its technology quickly as its enterprise business expanded.
“The rapid growth of ElevenAgents is a testament to this,” she said.
The new valuation comes four years after ElevenLabs raised its first investment round at a valuation of $9mn.
Alongside the expansion of ElevenAgents, the company continues to develop its underlying speech models. It recently released Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, while its technology can now speak, listen and translate across more than 90 languages.
ElevenLabs now employs more than 800 people. The company said the tender offer formed part of its policy of giving employees regular opportunities to realise some of the value of their holdings as the business grows.
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