Eleven Labs: The unicorn breaking language barriers with AI

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(5 minute read)

• This AI unicorn helps you automatically dub any piece of content

• Their product’s being used by employees at 41% of Fortune 500 companies.

• They’ve raised $101M in venture funding with their last round at a $1B valuation.

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? This is the story of Eleven Labs 📈

Eleven Labs was founded in London in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski (CTO) and Mati Staniszewski (CEO) with the vision to help content creators dub content with AI.

They also want to eventually be involved in the dubbing of feature films and TV shows.

Eleven Labs developed an AI voice synthesis software which turns text into human-like speech. 🎤 

🌩️The problem: Traditional methods of dubbing involve swapping original audio with a recording in another language. This can be expensive, (up to $100/minute) and take up to 2 weeks for just a 10 minute recording.

💡The solution: Eleven Labs has trained an AI model that preserves a voice across different languages. This allows for a human-quality personalized experience with emotions, intonation and speaker performance.

How it works is the user has to input an audio or video file into their software, and with a click of a button, have it fully dubbed.

How it started 🐣 

13 years ago, Piotr and Mati met at high school in Warsaw, Poland and became great friends. They both then moved to the UK for University.🎓

Piotr studied CS at Oxford and Cambridge, and published a paper on deep learning - which has gotten 677 citations to date. Piotr also worked on open-source projects, most notably Js2Py which has over 2M downloads.

He worked as an ML researcher and software engineer at companies like Google and Opera software.

Mati was completely different, having studied Mathematics at Imperial College London, graduating top of his class.

He then worked on product development and deployment at companies like Blackrock and Palantir.

He also started Mathscon: a student-led math conference which showed people the ‘fun side’ of math outside university eg. Learning the math behind getting an edge in poker. Mati brought together over 1,000 students over the course of 3 years.

The founders always talked about starting a company together and even collabed on many hackathon projects over the years.

They eventually found a startup opportunity in 2020 with the sudden increase in video calls…👨‍💻

The hustle🤝

In 2020, Piotr and Mati started thinking about the idea for a new voice tech product which could detect accents of people and change them.

Growing up, Piotr and Mati had the pain of watching foreign movies with terrible voiceovers and wanted to fix this.

They both then thought about automating dubbing. 

This is when Eleven Labs was born. They were on a mission to make all spoken content available in any language and any voice.

The founders see a future where anyone can access any spoken content in any language. This way anyone could gain access to the best education and entertainment out there.🎬

They could even use this tech to help people communicate with each other in different languages they don’t speak!

Over a single weekend, the pair created a sentiment analysis of how humans speak, the pronounciation we use and how to detect emotions we use.

Piotr and his girlfriend at the time, who didn’t speak any english, wanted to watch a Polish dubbed version of a movie. The experience was terrible.

Polish versions of movies are usually voiced by a single narrator who explains what’s happening rather than a cast of polish voice actors performing the script.

Target market 🎯 

Now that the founders had a tested idea and an initial product developed, it was time to start monetizing💸.

Eleven Labs’ target audience is content creators: Youtubers, other social media influencers and film production studios. 

Content creators spend over $4.6B/year on game localization and movie dubbing. The total estimated market for localization, translation and interpreting is $24B💰.

There’s over 50M content creators at the moment with 2M of them being professionals (full-time) and 100k+ Youtubers with over 500k subscribers. These numbers are only growing from here…

This means the opportunity for content creators alone is huge.

Eleven Labs currently has a free text-to-speech product where users can enter text and get a recording of that text read aloud by one of several default voices. Paying customers can upload their own voice samples to make new styles of audio.

Stats 📊

Mati has claimed that Eleven Labs has generated 100+ years of audio and that the platform is being used by employees at 41% of Fortune 500 companies📈.

The founders, Piotr and Mati, have been named in the Forbes 30 under 30 2024 list, adding to their already massive achievements.

Eleven Labs is one of the most well funded synthetic voice startups with $101M in funding - their latest raise being an $80M Series B this January. Their latest round puts the startup at a $1B valuation (officially making it a unicorn 🦄 ), up from just $100M last June.

Prominent investors in Eleven Labs include Andreesen Horowitz, former Github CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Big VCs including Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital and SV Angel also took part in funding the unicorn.

The cash from their most recent round was used toward product development, building on their infrastructure and team.

Eleven Labs plans on growing its team from just 40 people to 100 by the end of the year.

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