Mati Staniszewski from Eleven Labs revealed what he is working on and provided the company’s revenues

ElevenLabs develops models that turn text into speech that is confusingly similar to human speech. Many people have already heard this technology, often without knowing it, e.g. by calling the hotline.

The solutions of the Polish start-up are based on, among others: Klarna’s telephone customer service, which serves 35 million customers in the US. The technology is also used by Deutsche Telekom, Cisco and Adobe, as well as an increasing number of government institutions.

The company also sells its tools to creators who use them for recording audiobooks, dubbing and creating music.

The head of ElevenLabs provided real revenues

In an interview for Techcrunch, Mati Staniszewski admitted that ElevenLabs’ annual recurring revenue (ARR) is currently USD 600 million.

Over 55 percent comes from large companies. The rest is contributed mainly by small and medium-sized enterprises, developers and creators.

According to reports, investors value the company at USD 22 billion, although it has only been operating for four years.

Staniszewski emphasized in the interview that the company’s ambition is to be the first to pass the Turing test in conversational artificial intelligence. The purpose of this test is to assess the ability of an artificial intelligence to behave so similarly to a human that other humans would not be able to distinguish an interaction with the artificial intelligence from an interaction with another human.

According to the president of ElevenLabs, AI must understand the interlocutor’s emotions and respond appropriately, e.g. slow down the pace of speech or speak louder. As he admits, this has not yet been achieved.

Moreover, Mati Staniszewski revealed what his employees are working on: “Thousands of our colleagues mark in the recordings not only what was said, but also when, how and with what emotions. The company has hired speech trainers to precisely recognize accents,” he said.

The boundaries between models are blurring

Staniszewski also noted that in the AI ​​industry the boundaries between companies creating models, platforms and applications are blurring. He cites Anthropic as an example, which went from being a model creator to a platform.

He also noted that his company does not train text models, and this is where the debate most often takes place in this area of ​​AI. “ElevenLabs technology also does not allow agents to create new agents, and each client undergoes identity verification (KYC),” he told Techcrunch.

Preparations for the stock exchange debut are underway

Staniszewski did not confirm the reports about the stock exchange debut in 2028. He only stated that the company is preparing the foundations to be able to enter the stock exchange in the coming years, and the final decision depends on time and circumstances.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/