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ElevenLabs’ Vision for Voice Interfaces | CEO Mati Staniszewski

October 27, 2025

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  • ElevenLabs was founded in 2022, driven by the vision that AI voice technology would fundamentally change human interaction with technology, starting with solving poor narration quality in foreign language films. 
  • The company's initial focus was heavily weighted toward foundational research and research engineering, aiming to hire the best global talent remotely to achieve breakthroughs in emotional, human-sounding synthetic speech and voice recreation. 
  • ElevenLabs operates with a dual focus on an Agents Platform (for customer support and conversational AI) and a Creative Platform (for narration, dubbing, and media), leading to a near 50/50 split between B2B and B2C revenue. 

Segments

Origin of ElevenLabs Vision
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(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: The poor quality of foreign language narration (single voice) in Polish films was the initial trigger for founding ElevenLabs.
  • Summary: The CEO describes the initial motivation for starting ElevenLabs, stemming from the poor user experience of single-voice narration in Polish dubbed movies, leading to a broader vision for changing technology interaction via audio.
AI in Creative Production
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(00:00:19)
  • Key Takeaway: AI will replace parts of the creative process, like drafting scripts, resulting in human-AI indistinguishable outputs.
  • Summary: Discussion on how AI will assist in content creation workflows, such as drafting scripts and selecting voices, leading to iterations that combine human and AI input.
Introducing ElevenLabs’ Mission
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(00:01:12)
  • Key Takeaway: ElevenLabs is building infrastructure for how we speak and listen in the AI world, focusing on agents and creative platforms.
  • Summary: The host introduces Mati Staniszewski and ElevenLabs. The CEO outlines the company’s two main offerings: the agents platform for conversational AI and the creative platform for voiceover and dubbing.
Early Hiring Strategy
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(00:01:32)
  • Key Takeaway: The initial team prioritized hiring the world’s best researchers remotely to build foundational innovation.
  • Summary: Details on the initial team composition (researchers vs. engineers) and the strategy to hire globally and remotely to secure top research talent.
Advantage of Founding Pre-GPT
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(00:05:21)
  • Key Takeaway: Starting in 2022 allowed ElevenLabs to develop before the AI boom, attracting ’true missionaries’ and avoiding competition with major players.
  • Summary: Staniszewski explains that founding the company when AI was less popular gave them time to work and attracted highly dedicated talent focused on the mission.
Core 2022 Innovations
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(00:10:03)
  • Key Takeaway: ElevenLabs’ key breakthroughs were achieving human-like emotional text-to-speech and effective voice recreation.
  • Summary: The CEO details the two major technical achievements of 2022: making synthetic speech sound human by understanding context/emotion, and accurately encoding and reproducing voice characteristics.
Debate on Uncanny Valley
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(00:11:33)
  • Key Takeaway: The uncanny valley is crossed in low-stakes settings like customer support, but in immersive media, the goal is adaptation, not necessarily sounding human.
  • Summary: The host and CEO discuss whether AI voice/text has crossed the uncanny valley. They conclude that context matters; in customer support, resolution speed trumps human likeness, while in creative fields, emotional realism is key.
B2B vs. B2C Revenue Split
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(00:29:15)
  • Key Takeaway: Revenue is nearly split 50/50 between B2C creative use cases and B2B enterprise agents platform.
  • Summary: The CEO confirms the balanced revenue split, noting B2B growth is driven by conversational AI adoption, especially in support and customer experience workflows.
Company Size and Funding
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(00:33:50)
  • Key Takeaway: ElevenLabs has 330 employees and recently raised $100 million in a secondary tender to align employees for the long term.
  • Summary: Update on company size, remote/hub structure, and the rationale behind offering secondary liquidity to incentivize long-term commitment from employees.
Fighting the AI Giants
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(00:42:58)
  • Key Takeaway: ElevenLabs can compete by focusing on both foundational research and building a superior application platform that delivers measurable customer outcomes.
  • Summary: Staniszewski addresses the competitive pressure from large AI labs, emphasizing that success requires winning on both the model layer and the complex platform layer (integrations, deployment, outcome measurement).
Hiring Forecast and Future Focus
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(00:59:49)
  • Key Takeaway: Headcount is expected to double to over 500 in the next year to support scaling complex enterprise deployments and multi-modal research.
  • Summary: The CEO discusses headcount planning based on output goals, confirming significant hiring across product, engineering, and go-to-market to handle increasing complexity.