India’s Murf AI launches Falcon 2 to challenge voice AI leaders
Murf AI’s Falcon 2 voice model goes public on 20 August at $0.01 per generated minute, a fifth of what ElevenLabs charges. The company claims it outperforms some OpenAI models on the independent Artificial Analysis leaderboard.
Based in Bangalore, Murf AI is offering synthetic speech at a fraction of the cost compared to Europe’s leading voice AI startup, ElevenLabs.
At scale, this translates to a significant price difference: a million minutes of speech costs $10,000 on Falcon 2, compared to $50,000 on ElevenLabs Turbo and Flash.
Murf claims Falcon 2 scores higher than certain OpenAI models, including its Realtime API, on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, responding in under 100 milliseconds. However, these claims should be taken with a grain of salt as the model won’t be publicly available until Thursday, and the comparison relies on a third-party leaderboard.
This is not the first time Murf has made such a bold statement. In November 2025, they launched the first Falcon with a press release claiming it outperformed ElevenLabs at 55 millisecond latency.
Murf AI was founded in 2020 by three IIT Kharagpur engineers, backed by Matrix Partners and Elevation Capital. They boast 10 million users and 300 corporate clients, including Cisco, Pfizer, Nestlé, and Air France-KLM.
The challenge to ElevenLabs isn’t just about price. Murf emphasizes trust, partnering with real voice actors who consent to the use of their voices, with transparent contracts, ongoing royalties, and data protection measures.
European institutions have already invested in ElevenLabs, with Poland taking an $11 million stake and the UK government signing an agreement to use its voice AI in public services.
Falcon 2 offers enterprise-level features, including data residency in 11 countries, deployment in a customer’s cloud, 10,000 concurrent calls, and training on live customer interactions.
This presents a significant challenge to Europe’s existing AI pricing model, which prioritizes quality and trust over cost. A model achieving comparable benchmarks at a fraction of the price is a game-changer.