ElevenLabs’ Journey to $80 Million Series B Funding

ElevenLabs, a voice AI software, has landed some pretty significant funding — a whopping $80 million of Series B funding that led to a company valuation of $1.1 billion. 

How did they get there?

Their distinctive, technologically advanced voice AI software that makes live translations of you talking in any language was certainly a pivotal part. But ElevanLabs did much more than develop software that’s right on trend for today’s tech era. They built connections with industry experts, applied marketing strategies, and… 

Well, let’s dive in to explore exactly how they achieved this phenomenal success and uncover how they’re still on top of their A(I) game now so you can replicate their steps. 

What ElevenLabs Does 

ElevenLabs’ core technology revolves around cutting-edge voice AI for real-time voice cloning and speech synthesis. This innovative technology enables users to generate highly realistic and natural-sounding voice outputs. 

Let’s break down all the ways they and their clients can use this tech.

Text-to-Speech

Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology turns written words into spoken voice for accessible and interactive content. It’s commonly used in education, entertainment, and customer service.

ElevenLabs shines in this market with their advanced TTS tech that creates realistic, emotional voices in many languages. This ability to produce lifelike speech has helped ElevenLabs stand out and grow rapidly. 

Their TTS technology offers a natural and engaging voice for any content to attract content creators looking for a natural TTS. By focusing on quality and customization, ElevenLabs has become a key player in the voice AI market, while many other companies still struggle. In fact, they just won number 9 on G2’s list of the Best New Software Products for 2024.

Dubbing and Translation

Speech-to-speech dubbing and translation technology translate to your chosen language in real-time. This technology makes it easier for people who speak different languages to communicate with one another for international business, travel, and customer support. 

ElevenLabs uses speech-to-speech with voice AI for translations that sound natural and retain the speaker’s tone, voice, and emotion. 

ElevenLabs’ speech-to-speech technology has boosted their success and led to a global customer base. In fact, this technology contributed to their rapid growth and secured them major funding and partnerships.

This technology is pretty amazing, so I figured I’d try it out myself. I translated the same script between English and Spanish myself. Then, I recorded videos of myself saying it in both languages to test how accurately it reproduced my voice. 

Here’s my original video of me speaking English.

Now, you can see how it dubbed me into Spanish. 

Here’s me speaking Spanish so you can compare ElevenLabs’ accuracy.

Here’s ElevenLabs’ video of this translated into English. Compare it to my original English version — there are a few differences, but I think the voice and translation are both pretty realistic.

Overall, it’s pretty easy to understand why this technology played a leading role in ElevenLabs’ success. Each of these videos only took a few seconds to process, so if I led a team that spoke multiple languages, it’d be easy to give the same presentation in everyone’s native language.

Voice Cloning

Voice cloning is a technology that creates a digital replica of a person’s voice. It’s increasingly popular for creating personalized audio content, dubbing, and making digital assistants sound more lifelike. This technology caters to professional and personal use, from creating voiceovers for entertainment to assisting those who may lose their ability to speak.

ElevenLabs’ voice cloning technology stands out because it accurately captures a person’s tone, pitch, and emotional inflections. Their AI analyzes a short audio sample of the target voice and then replicates it with astonishing accuracy. This allows you to make highly personalized and engaging content that’s human-like.

Voice cloning is a key factor in ElevenLabs’ success. It positioned them as innovators in the voice AI market and created new opportunities for content creation and accessibility. 

The ability to produce high-quality, realistic voice replicas has attracted various clients, from filmmakers and game developers to companies looking to enhance their customer service experience. ElevenLabs’ technology has significantly contributed to their growth and is helping them secure a strong foothold in the competitive AI landscape.

Voice Library

ElevenLabs’ Voice Library provides access to a vast collection of pre-made and customizable voice models. This library caters to a wide range of applications, from content creation and audiobooks to virtual assistants and educational tools.

It serves a diverse market that seeks to enhance digital content with high-quality, realistic voices across various languages and accents. 

Over 361,500 people have used their most popular voice — suitable for narratives and storytelling — to generate more than a billion characters’ worth of audio.

Want a middle-aged African woman to give formal dictation for a TV show? They’ve got you covered.

What about an excited, young voice to speak in Latin American Spanish for commercials? They have a clone of a real voice actor who worked with ElevenLabs’ voice cloning to create this audio.

The Voice Library was pivotal in ElevenLabs’ rise to success. By democratizing access to high-quality voice models, ElevenLabs’ broad appeal and selection of voices attracted a wide customer base, establishing them as a leader in the voice AI industry.

The Story of ElevenLabs’ Rise

ElevenLabs began their journey in the voice AI industry with a modest $2 million in funding in January 2022. That’s not too long ago, so it’s remarkable how quickly they’ve grown to a billion-dollar company since they started as a simple partnership between two close friends.

But it’s worth looking at how the industry looked without ElevenLabs to paint a picture of how they exploded onto the scene so quickly. 

They outlined their competitors in 2022 in the slide here:

As you can see, they were the only solution with both the quality and the accessibility the industry needed. You could either use a low-quality automated solution, which was fast but low-quality, or a traditional, slow process.

Series A Funding and Products

Just six months after their $2 million pre-seed funding, ElevenLabs successfully closed a $19 million Series A (the first round) for further funding. Their pitch at this level was primarily driven by their existing AI dubbing technology, like the dubbing videos I posted above. You can read their full Series A pitch deck here. 

In general, it focuses on their dubbing product’s success and the opportunities for expanding into new product opportunities.

This round was co-led by notable figures, including entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, along with the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz. 

Other participants in the funding round included 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. 

There are some VCs and other tech entrepreneurs on that list, but two names that stand out are Suleyman and O’Reilly. Suleyman has experience founding not one but two major AI companies, bringing some real industry expertise to the table. O’Reilly is an established force in Silicon Valley, with deep connections ever since he popularized the term “open source” back in 1998.

At the time of the Series A funding, ElevenLabs operated with a lean team of 15 employees and no physical office. They relied on an efficient and focused approach to product development and market expansion. First, they put all their effort into developing an automatic dubbing solution.

With that complete, they used their Series A funding to focus on voice generation. Rather than converting one speaker’s language to another with speech-to-speech, they created a text-to-speech conversion.

They called the new product Projects — a feature that converted text into full-length audiobooks. 

At this stage, ElevenLabs made two important strategic decisions. First, they took funding from the right partners. VCs had the cash they needed to get started, and industry experts like Suleyman and O’Reilly could guide them with their experience, highlighting the importance of teaming with industry experts. 

Second, they kept a tight focus on developing one product category at a time — and delivering each to an exceptional standard that made it almost impossible for investors to decline. While it’s easy to imagine all the amazing things their cutting-edge AI can do, they had to stay focused on not overcommitting their small team’s limited resources.

Series B Funding and Product Expansion

Just about six months after that Series A funding, ElevenLabs received their Series B funding of $80 million from many of the same investors. Along with it came a serious upgrade to its valuation of over $1.1 billion as of January 2024.

They used this new funding for a few ambitious objectives:

• Voice AI Research: ElevenLabs got where they are by having the most advanced technology on the market. They knew their strength was their product excellence, and they invested in improving it further.
• Product Expansion: Voice AI is still in its infancy, and ElevenLabs sees plenty of opportunities for expansion in the future by creating products for localization and advertising, for example, as they outlined in their Series A pitch deck. They make their industry-leading research valuable by turning it into groundbreaking products.
• Infrastructure Upgrades: Hosting powerful AI technology, hours of audio and video, and a growing number of users has a serious infrastructure cost. For ElevenLabs to grow, they need to commit a big chunk of that cash to their infrastructure. As they do the research and expand their product line, they build out the capacity to handle their growth.

ElevenLabs’ future looks bright. But the takeaways from this stage of their expansion are clear: Investing even more in what made them great, creating room for expansion, and building an infrastructure and systems to handle their growth are the three pillars for their continued success.

ElevenLabs’ Marketing Strategy

Oftentimes, a site’s traffic patterns tell a story about how a company got where they are. That’s never been clearer than in ElevenLabs’ case. Let’s talk about what their site data tells about their overall marketing strategy and how they reached the level of success they have.

ElevenLabs’ Homepage Strength

ElevenLabs’ homepage generates the vast majority of their traffic volume, which is worth over $134,935. That doesn’t change by much when you look at the traffic value, either. That’s an unusual profile for a site of its size.

Their organic traffic comes from search terms such as “elevenlabs”, “eleven labs”, and “11 labs” with a combined 91,000 searches monthly, indicating that people have already heard about ElevenLabs and are looking for them specifically — not generic terms like “AI dubbing”.

But it isn’t all referrals from other sites or people searching for their brand name that have led to people knowing about ElevenLabs. Their homepage ranks in the top three for high-volume search terms like “ai voice generator” (104,000 searches monthly), “voice ai” (52,000 searches monthly), and “ai voice” (41,000 searches monthly).

ElevenLabs built a homepage that topped the SERPs for every search related to their name — that allows them to rely on their homepage as the main source of organic traffic.

Social Media Strategy

Not all of ElevenLabs’ traffic originates from Google. They also receive attention on social media, where customers and other AI organizations upload content using their technology or repost ElevenLabs’ original posts. This social media strategy increases brand awareness and is an important source of traffic to their website.

ElevenLabs makes their tools easy to use, so content creators can include them in their videos (AI-generated voices narrating videos are common these days). Plus, AI forums, such as AI Breakfast, are likely to post videos using ElevenLabs’ AI software to show how this latest technology works. 

For example, this video about ElevenLabs has over 500,000 views, and it calls ElevenLabs the best AI voice generator.

Similarly, this video demonstrates their use and has almost 2 million views on X.

Multilingual voice cloning from Elevenlabs is insane:

Joe Rogan reads Athletic Greens ad in flawless Spanish (100% AI generated) pic.twitter.com/lDVYpHH2TW

— AI Breakfast (@AiBreakfast) May 2, 2023

On TikTok, there are more than 14,000 videos using the hashtag #ElevenLabs, including this one with over 1.5 million views.

@millionairepsycho How to create a viral AI voice to use for your own content. #AI #AIvoice #chatgpt #elevenlabs #entrepreneurship #businesstok ♬ Murder (Slowed) – Bgnzinho

ElevenLabs successfully made a product widely available and usable for social media users — for business and individual use. Through this ease of use, and the product’s own quality, it has naturally spread awareness through organic sharing.

Bottom-of-the-Funnel Content

ElevenLabs focuses on Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) content on the rest of their website pages to convert visitors to customers.

For example, one of ElevenLabs’ top-performing pages is this blog post. It’s a comparison page, which is a highly effective way to show how your product is much better than your competitors. Another comparison page on ElevenLabs’ website ranks in the top 10 for terms like “elevenlabs alternatives.” 

Comparison pages are a great way to target BOFU keywords because they speak directly to the reader’s search intent. They show key facts about products that your audience is comparing while framing the conversation in terms that are favourable to you.

One great way to illustrate the differences between your product and others is with simple tables like this one:

That makes the advantages and disadvantages of each product as clear as day. It’s not the kind of content that will always get hundreds of thousands of organic visitors, but it can be highly effective in converting customers over to your side.

Their comparison pages use images like this one to illustrate the advantages of their software over others.

Overall, ElevenLabs has a highly refined idea of what BOFU content is and why they create it. It doesn’t always generate the most traffic, but it ranks for important keywords and lets them lure in people ready to make a purchase.

What to Learn from ElevenLabs

First, ElevenLabs focused on creating the best product at the cutting edge of technology to secure funding. A high-quality, standout product or service should always be a company’s number one priority.

Then, they built a strong brand, connections with industry leaders, and a homepage dominating the SERPs. They made it easy to share on social media, and that’s exactly what people did.  

Plus, when people search for “voice AI”, they appear at the top. If you look for alternatives, they also appear. Their dedication to crafting blue ocean software and supporting it with a conversion-oriented content marketing strategy has put them in a league of their own.

But this isn’t the only way to a sudden spike in valuation. For another journey to a multibillion-dollar valuation, check out how Lattice used great content marketing to help them reach $3 billion.