ElevenLabs, a New York-based AI-powered platform for creating synthetic voices, announced that it raised $19 million in a Series A funding round co-led by entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross alongside Andreessen Horowitz.
Other participants included heavyweights Creator Ventures, SV Angel, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, Deepmind and Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly.
“This investment will be used to continue building ElevenLab’s cutting-edge research hub for voice AI and to launch a range of additional products to support specific market verticals such as publishing, gaming, entertainment and conversational applications,” co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski told TechCrunch via email.
ElevenLabs can transform the text into speech using synthetic voices, cloned voices, or entirely artificial voices that mimic people of different genders, ages, and ethnicities. The company's AI text-to-speech models are language-agnostic, allowing corporate customers to customize and build their proprietary speech models.
Company: ElevenLabs Inc.
Raised: $19.0M
Round: Series A
Funding Month: June 2023
Lead Investors: Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Andreessen Horowitz
Additional Investors: Creator Ventures, SV Angel, Mike Krieger, Brendan Iribe, Mustafa Suleyman, and Tim O'Reilly
Company Website: https://beta.elevenlabs.io/
Software Category: AI Speech Software
About the Company: ElevenLabs, founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, is a research company specializing in voice technology. Their focus lies in developing AI speech software tailored for publishers and creators. The primary objective of the company is to enable the seamless conversion of spoken audio across different languages. To achieve this, ElevenLabs has constructed advanced text-to-speech models that utilize high compression techniques and contextual understanding to deliver a remarkably lifelike human speech. Additionally, ElevenLabs provides a comprehensive set of tools for voice cloning and designing synthetic voices. Its mission is to make on-demand multilingual audio support a reality across education, streaming, audiobooks, gaming, movies, and even real-time conversation.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/voice-generating-platform-elevenlabs-raises-19m-launches-detection-tool/