ElevenLabs’ CEO on hitting ~$600m revenue and outrunning the AI labs
ElevenLabs has gone from a research project to a reported $600m in annual revenue in under three years. On stage in Paris, co-founder Mati Staniszewski explained how a voice-AI startup plans to survive the companies whose models it pays to use.
July 8, 2026 – 5:20 pm
Image by: TNW
The ALL-IN Podcast took its live show to the Louvre this week for the RAISE Summit. It put ElevenLabs co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski in the hot seat. Host Jason Calacanis opened where it stings: revenue, competition, and whether a voice startup can outlast OpenAI and Anthropic.
"It’s the best time to be building," Staniszewski said.
A revenue ramp few can match
The numbers set the tone. Staniszewski said the company shipped its first genuinely human-sounding text-to-speech model in early 2023. It then took roughly 20 months to reach $100m in annual recurring revenue. The next jumps came faster. He put it at about 10 months to $200m, then five months to $300m by the close of last year. Calacanis pegged the current run rate near $600m, and Staniszewski did not dispute it. That climb tracks the startup’s soaring paper value, recently in talks at a $22bn valuation.
No product managers, engineers everywhere
Growth has not softened the structure. Staniszewski said ElevenLabs runs on small teams of five to 10 people, and it has never employed product managers. Instead, it embeds engineers in nearly every function, including legal, talent, and go-to-market.
Those engineers carry two jobs. They build internal automations, and they help colleagues adopt AI safely, with a security check on whatever ships. Give a marketer or a lawyer the right tools, the pitch goes, and they jump from amateur to advanced in skills that once belonged to someone else.
People tell the machine the truth
Staniszewski argued that voice has quietly turned a corner. Enterprises and sales teams drove much of the recent growth, he said, as real-time, interruptible voice agents finally felt reliable enough to trust.
One detail stood out. The company works with financial firms like Revolut and Klarna on payment reminders. There, it found people are often more honest with an AI than with a human. The shame drops away, so callers share their real situation. They also talk to the machine differently, snappier and quicker to cut it off.
The cloning tightrope
Voice is identity, which makes misuse the constant risk. Calacanis described finding his own cloned voice running a joke podcast built from his show’s archive. Staniszewski said ElevenLabs now moderates everything it generates. It checks samples at the voice and text level, and blocks commercial or scam misuse. It also built a classifier that flags AI-generated audio, for its own models and open-source ones.
The same technology opens doors. A creator marketplace lets voice actors licence their voice and earn from it, and Staniszewski said the company has paid out more than $22m to that community.
ElevenLabs has also licensed multilingual versions of Matthew McConaughey’s voice. It powered an interactive Darth Vader in Fortnite through Disney. And it…