ElevenLabs, a Polish AI speech startup, reached a $6.6 billion valuation in October with both cofounders becoming billionaires.

Hacker News · April 27, 2026

AI Summary

•ElevenLabs raised more than $300 million in funding and achieved a $6.6 billion valuation in October. Cofounders Mateusz Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski are each worth just over $1 billion. The company generated $193 million in trailing 12-month revenue, netting $116 million (a 60% margin), making it profitable.
•Its AI text-to-speech models can clone voices and translate videos into 29 languages. A testing comparison by Labelbox found ElevenLabs made half as many errors as OpenAI when reading a quiz aloud. The company maintains a library of 10,000 voices, including A-listers Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey, and charges up to three times as much as American competitors.
•Corporate clients including Cisco, Twilio, and Adecco use ElevenLabs for customer service calls and recruitment interviews. Epic Games uses it to voice Fortnite characters. The company faced a lawsuit from audiobook narrators alleging copyright-protected audiobooks were used to train models; the case settled out of court in November.
•ElevenLabs launched an AI music generator in August and plans AI avatars for video creation next year. It has spent $50 million on a data center project in Oregon to expand GPU capacity.

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