Twenty Minutes with ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski: Inside the $22 Billion Voice AI Company
ElevenLabs builds the voice layer of AI โ the models that turn text into speech indistinguishable from a human voice. Most people encounter it without realizing: when they call customer service, they may be talking to an ElevenLabs model. Klarna runs first-line phone support for 35 million U.S. customers on it, for example. So do Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Adobe, and a growing list of governments. ElevenLabs also sells to creators, who use its platform for audiobooks, dubbing, and music.
It's not alone in what it does. In fact, it's increasingly bumping into customers, including Decagon, a conversational AI platform that trained its voice product on ElevenLabs and now competes with it. But its investors don't seem too concerned. The company, which says it's pacing at $600 million in annual recurring revenue, is now reportedly valued at $22 billion by its backers, despite being just four years old.
To understand more, I interviewed ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski at Nrth in Toronto, a local entrepreneurship conference formerly known as Elevate. We covered a range of topics in a short time, including whether businesses should tell customers when they're talking to an AI (he thinks they should), and whether he could discuss the company's gross margins. Unsurprisingly, Staniszewski said he couldn't discuss them in any detail, but he was clear that he doesn't mind them getting squeezed even further if it means expanding the company's market share.
Our conversation follows, condensed and lightly edited. You can check out the full conversation here.
TechCrunch: You joined us at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, where you said audio models would be commoditized within a couple of years. How would you rate that prediction now?
Mati Staniszewski: There is still a lot of work to be done, and the quality delta you can achieve just on the model level is still significant. If we think longer term, probably three, five years from now, those differences will be smaller. What we'd love to do, and be the first ones to do, is pass the Turing test for conversational AI. You need to combine intelligence, but you also need emotional intelligence. You need to understand the emotions of the other side, to be able to slow down or speak up. That hasn't yet been done.
What percentage of the business is enterprise now?
We are now $600 million in ARR. Fifty-five-percent plus is classic enterprise, and a big percentage of the [remaining] 45% are small and medium businesses, developers, builders, creators.
Like everyone else in AI, you're increasingly competing with your customers. Decagon trained its voice product on you and now runs queries through its own models.
The lines become more blurry. As we think about model companies, platform companies, application companies, in the past you'd have very clear splits where one starts and ends. Today that line is much more blurry. In Anthropic's case, what was a model company is definitely a platform and increasingly a wide set of applications. I think this will continue.
Your customers can choose the "reasoning layer" from a menu of options at ElevenLabs. What are you seeing in terms of the use of frontier lab models versus open-weight?
It's less of a binary choice. In customer experience, if you're calling in and it's just informational, you're not executing any actions โ you can use a lot of the open-source models...
(Editor's note: This article was originally published on July 2, 2026, and has been updated with additional context on ElevenLabs' $22 billion valuation and its enterprise customers.)
via TechCrunch