Sep 8, 2025, 9:54 AM ETInterview

ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup

Eleven Labs has crossed $200 million in annual revenue, growing from $100M in 20 months and reaching $200M in approximately 10–15 months.
Revenue trajectory: Started at roughly $35 million at the end of 2023; grew to $100M by mid-2024; reached $200M by early 2025.
Valuation and Fundraising:
- Pre-seed round: Raised $2 million at a $9 million post-money valuation (approx. 11% equity sold) in early 2023.
- Series A (June 2023): Raised $19 million from Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross (NFDG), Brian Armstrong (A16Z), and others.
- Series B (October 2024): Raised capital at a 30x revenue multiple to fund multimodal research, global expansion, and agentic platform capabilities.
Largest Contract: Approximately $2 million, primarily with enterprise clients in call centers, customer support, and personal assistance.
Compute Strategy: Built proprietary data centers for training and inference; calculated a two-year horizon break-even point where owning infrastructure is cheaper than renting, enabling faster experimentation.

Origin Pivot: Originally founded on an "AI dubbing" concept inspired by poor movie dubbing in Poland; pivoted to Text-to-Speech (TTS) and voice cloning after initial interest from YouTubers was lackluster.
PMF Trigger: Product-market fit was confirmed when a beta user (audiobook author) generated hundreds of books using the tool, leading to 1,000 waiting list signups after a viral blog post featuring an AI "laughing."
Core Competency: Eleven Labs focuses on owning the full stack from research to production, utilizing custom models to achieve emotional intonation and voice replication that generalist models (e.g., OpenAI's early iterations) could not match.
Strategic Shift: Moving from a horizontal self-serve creator model to an agentic platform focusing on conversational AI, voice agents, and deep enterprise integrations (Salesforce, ServiceNow, SIP trunking).
Competitive Moat: Founder claims a 6–12 month lead over competitors in specific voice use cases, leveraging a small, elite research team (5–10 researchers in the global top 100) and rapid execution speed.
Future Outlook: Views voice as the primary interface for future technology; believes scaling laws in voice are not plateauing as they might in LLMs, though narration quality may stabilize soon.

Team Size: Currently 250 employees organized into approximately 20 small, autonomous teams (5–10 people each) focused on specific product areas rather than traditional functional silos.
No Titles Policy: The company abolished formal job titles to prevent internal distraction and allow high-impact individuals to lead teams immediately upon joining; leadership is determined by capability rather than tenure.
Hiring Philosophy:
- Founders interview every single hire to signal culture and standards.
- Focus on "growing" talent internally rather than hiring senior external executives, supplemented by mentorship from US-based advisors.
- Hiring Mistake: Admits to taking too long to separate with misaligned hires; now advocates for immediate separation if early signals are negative.
- Global Expansion: Building local outposts in Brazil, Japan, India, and Mexico to localize go-to-market efforts.
Liquidity: Conducts secondary transactions and tender offers in every round to provide employees with liquidity, reducing the pressure to sell the company early and aligning long-term incentives.

Speed as Differentiator: Emphasizes that "speed of execution and speed of investing" is the primary differentiator in the current AI landscape; favors investors who can close quickly over those requiring long roadshows.
Investor Selection: Prefers partners who demonstrate "skin in the game" before investment (e.g., Nat Friedman testing APIs) and who provide active support (e.g., introductions to celebrities or enterprise partners).
European vs. US Ecosystem:
- Rejects the notion that European talent works harder than US talent; cites "missionary" dedication within the European team.
- Advocates for building European companies with global ambition rather than focusing on local markets.
- Suggests the European regulatory environment is a hurdle; would recommend aligning EU AI law with US law to foster innovation.

Handling Setbacks: When an enterprise partner released a "dubbing" product using Eleven Labs' tech before the company launched their own, the leadership advised the team to acknowledge the frustration authentically rather than glossing over it, then refocused on relentless execution.
Acquisition Stance: Received acquisition offers (including from major tech firms) but consistently rejected them, preferring to build long-term value.
- Engaged in due diligence on acquisitions to understand the process rather than sell.
- Currently considering a $100M+ acquisition of a competitor to accelerate capabilities, viewing it as a calculated risk.
Founder Brand: Initially worried founder visibility might detract from the engineering team's contributions, but now sees value in elevating the founder brand to complement the company's growth narrative.
Consumer Preferences: Founder Matti admits to using Google Maps, 8 Sleep, and Lovable; would personally invest in OpenAI (coding/AGI) and Google (Gemini/Genie) if given the choice among major AI stocks.
Regulatory Stance: Would immediately align European AI regulation with US laws or create an EU "opt-in" zone to avoid stifling innovation.