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🚀 How Two Polish Friends Built a $3.3B Voice AI Empire in Just 3 Years

Author

Profit Monk
May 26, 2025

"Don’t seek happiness. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy, and you might find you get some as a side effect." Tim Minchin

🚀 How ElevenLabs Rocketed to a $3.3B Valuation in Just 3 Years

The TL;DR: From a $2M seed round in 2022 to a $180M Series C at $3.3B valuation! Two Polish childhood friends built the world's leading voice AI platform by making any voice speak any language.

When childhood friends Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski from Poland started ElevenLabs in 2022 with just $2 million in funding, the voice AI market was dominated by robotic-sounding alternatives. Three years later, they've built a $3.3 billion company that's being used by 60% of Fortune 500 companies and has processed over 1,000 years worth of AI-generated audio. Their breakthrough wasn't just technical—it was strategic. While competitors focused on making AI voices sound human, ElevenLabs asked a different question: what if we could make any voice speak any language while preserving the original speaker's emotional nuance? This insight led them to create technology so impressive that users naturally share their creations on social media, driving viral growth without paid advertising. Their homepage alone generates three times more traffic than the rest of their website combined. With major partnerships spanning from Time Magazine to NVIDIA, and strategic investors like Deutsche Telekom and HubSpot betting on their vision, ElevenLabs shows how product excellence combined with organic virality can create billion-dollar businesses in emerging AI categories.

💡 Problem Solved:

  • Voice dubbing and localization was expensive and time-consuming

  • Content creators couldn't reach global audiences in native languages

  • AI voices sounded robotic and unnatural

  • Traditional voice cloning required extensive recording sessions

🛠️ How It Works:

Revolutionary voice AI that clones any voice with just minutes of audio → translate and dub content while preserving original speaker's voice → generate speech in 29+ languages with emotional nuance

🔄 The Origin Story:

Childhood friends Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski from Poland founded ElevenLabs in 2022, starting with just $2M in seed funding to tackle voice AI's biggest challenges

📈 Growth Strategy:

  • Product-First Approach: Built the most advanced voice AI technology on the market

  • Voice Library Marketplace: Democratized access with 5,000+ voices from creators

  • Strategic Partnerships: Collaborated with Time, Washington Post, HarperCollins, NVIDIA

  • Homepage Domination: Homepage drives 3x more traffic than rest of site combined

  • Social Media Virality: Users naturally share AI-generated content showcasing capabilities

💰 Revenue Journey:

$2M seed (2022) → $19M Series A at $99M valuation (June 2023) → $80M Series B at $1.1B valuation (Jan 2024) → $180M Series C at $3.3B valuation (Jan 2025)

💼 Funding Powerhouse:

Latest round co-led by a16z and ICONIQ Growth → Previous investors: Sequoia Capital, Salesforce Ventures, NEA → Strategic partners: Deutsche Telekom, LG Technology Ventures, HubSpot Ventures

💪 Competitive Edge:

  • ARR Growth: From $25M to $90M in just 10 months

  • Market Leadership: 60% of Fortune 500 companies use their platform

  • Product Breadth: Voice cloning, dubbing, sound effects, conversational AI

  • Safety First: Built-in protections against misuse with public figure voice blocking

  • Technical Excellence: Flash Model with 75ms latency - fastest on market

🤖 AI Revolution Impact:

  • 1 million hours of audio localized

  • 1 million hours of text converted to speech via ElevenReader

  • 10 million sound effects generated

  • 250,000 conversational AI agents built in just 2 months

  • $2M+ paid out to voice actors through Voice Library

🔮 What's Next:

Expanding conversational AI capabilities → Building omni-modal AI combining text and audio → Democratizing content creation for global audiences → Making all information accessible in any voice and language

🔑 The Winning Formula:

"Focus obsessively on product excellence first, let users naturally showcase your capabilities on social media, dominate search results, then scale through strategic partnerships."

👇 Your Turn:

Have you tried voice AI yet? Could tools like ElevenLabs help you reach global audiences without expensive dubbing studios?

Try ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io

Current holdings - for the quarter

If you had to own one stock today - we would say own NVDA

If you had to own 3 stocks today - we would say own - NVDA, COST, AVGO

If you had to own 5 stocks today - we would say own - NVDA, COST, AVGO, META and LLY

Not investment advice

Here is how this strategy seems to do - when backtested for the past 20 years -

2719% overall returns

Average annual return of 18.68%

Max drawdown of 45.9% (2008-2009 timeframe)

“Here’s my idea of romance: You will soon be dead. Life will sometimes seem long and tough and, God, it’s tiring. And you will sometimes be happy and sometimes sad. And then you’ll be old. And then you’ll be dead. There is only one sensible thing to do with this empty existence, and that is: fill it.”

Tim Minchin (Comedian, Writer)

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