Inside Eleven Labs’ Unicorn Journey: from a weekend project to $3.3 billion

Dear readers, apologies for the delay – flu season has hit North Connecticut hard, and we haven't been spared. Stay safe!

Intro

ElevenLabs seems to be everywhere. In January 2025, Lex Fridman’s three-hour interview with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Kyiv featured ElevenLabs’ AI-powered translations in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, flawlessly preserving Zelenskyy’s voice and intonations. It was a striking showcase of AI’s ability to bridge language barriers.

Ask anyone, and they’ll say: just try ElevenLabs – it’s incredible. Their partners? A powerhouse lineup across industries. If an ethical concern threatens to cast a shadow over their technology, ElevenLabs moves fast, flipping potential bad publicity into another win. They just seem to do everything right – except that they never share their research and don’t open-source.

A few weeks ago, they closed another big round, raising $108 million at a $3.3 billion valuation – investors were lining up to get in. How did two guys from Poland push ElevenLabs to the forefront of AI voice technology? Why does everyone love them, despite their secrecy?

Let’s explore their journey, dominance in AI voice, and strategy for staying everywhere – and beloved.

In today’s episode:

• How it all started – dubbing in Poland sucks

• Research-first company with direct outreach to businesses

• ChatGPT comes in handy – Investors want GenAI

• Very wrong predictions

• Laser-focus business strategy

• Financial situation – everyone wants a piece

• Market size

• How do they make money?

• Products - Conversational AI

• Tech spec and Research – Unknown 

• “Open-source” to promote

• Key competitors – big and small

• Final Thoughts

• Bonus: Resources

How it all started – dubbing in Poland sucks

Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski have known each other forever – since their teenage years at Copernicus High School in Warsaw. That’s a pretty tight bond, but when you know someone that well, working together can be tough. Still, these two managed to turn their shared passion for technology into a long-term collaboration.

Over the years, they loved their occasional weekend projects, always tackling problems that mattered to both of them. Life, meanwhile, went on. Both Piotr and Mati moved to the UK for college – Mati studied mathematics at Imperial College London, while Piotr pursued computer science at Oxford/Cambridge – further sharpening their technical expertise and entrepreneurial instincts. Then came seven years of working at big-name companies: Opera Software, BlackRock, and Palantir for Mati; Tessian and Google for Piotr.

That could have been the path forever, but one of their weekend projects suddenly revealed a potential solution to a frustration they had shared since childhood: the state of movie dubbing in Poland. Foreign films, often voiced by a single monotone narrator, sounded just awful. While experimenting with speech analysis, Mati and Piotr became intrigued by the nuances of pronunciation, emotion, and tonality in voice. It was a moment of clarity – if voice synthesis could be improved to capture authentic emotion and character, it had the potential to redefine content accessibility worldwide. And maybe, finally, save Polish people from terrible dubbing!

Not waiting too long, in April 2022, Mati and Piotr took their weekend project to the next level and started ElevenLabs.

Research-first company with direct outreach to businesses