ElevenLabs Raises $500M to Move Beyond Voice AI Into Video and Agents

What if a company could grow its revenue by $100 million in just five months? ElevenLabs just proved it's possible in the red-hot voice AI market.

From Voice Specialist to Multi-Modal Giant

The voice AI company announced today it raised $500 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital, catapulting its valuation to $11 billion—more than triple its January 2025 valuation. The meteoric rise reflects not just strong financials, but ambitious plans to expand far beyond voice technology.

Sequoia partner Andrew Reed is joining the board, while existing investors doubled down aggressively. a16z quadrupled its investment, and previous lead investor ICONIQ tripled its stake. New backers include Lightspeed Venture Partners, EvanticCapital, and BOND, with additional strategic partners to be announced in February.

The numbers tell a compelling story. ElevenLabs closed 2025 with $330 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), with co-founder Mati Staniszewski revealing it took just five months to jump from $200 million to $300 million ARR. That's the kind of growth that makes even seasoned VCs take notice.

Beyond Voice: The Real Ambition

But here's where it gets interesting—ElevenLabs isn't content to remain a voice-only player. The company is betting big on becoming a comprehensive AI interaction platform.

"We plan to expand our Creative offering—helping creators combine our best-in-class audio with video and Agents—enabling businesses to build agents that can talk, type, and take action," Staniszewski said. This isn't just feature expansion; it's a fundamental pivot toward owning the entire AI-human interaction stack.

The company already signaled this direction with its January partnership with LTX to produce audio-to-video content. Imagine transforming a podcast into a fully animated video, or turning a simple voice memo into professional marketing content. For creators and businesses, this could eliminate entire production workflows.

The Voice AI Gold Rush Intensifies

The massive funding reflects broader investor appetite for voice AI infrastructure. Rival Deepgram raised $130 million at a $1.3 billion valuation just last month, while Google has been aggressively hiring talent from voice model company Hume AI, including CEO Alan Cowen.

This isn't coincidental. As conversational AI becomes mainstream through ChatGPT, Claude, and others, voice represents the next frontier. The question isn't whether we'll talk to our computers—it's which platform will dominate that conversation.

ElevenLabs plans to use the funding for R&D and international expansion into India, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, and Mexico. These markets represent billions of potential users who might leapfrog traditional interfaces straight to voice-first experiences.

The Platform Play

What makes ElevenLabs particularly interesting is its positioning as infrastructure rather than just an app. While competitors focus on specific use cases, ElevenLabs is building the pipes that other companies will use to add voice capabilities to their products.

This infrastructure approach has proven lucrative in other sectors—think Stripe for payments or Twilio for communications. If ElevenLabs can establish similar dominance in voice AI, its current valuation might look conservative in hindsight.

The expansion into video and agents suggests even bigger ambitions: becoming the go-to platform for any company wanting to add AI-powered interaction capabilities. That's a much larger addressable market than voice alone.