AI voice cloning startup ElevenLabs raises $250M in Series C funding round – News

The synthetic voice startup Eleven Labs Inc. closed on a bumper $250 million Series C funding round, bringing its valuation to between $3 billion and $3.3 billion.

According to a Friday report by News, the round was led by ICONIQ Growth and saw participation from previous investor Andreessen Horowitz, which was one of the lead backers of the company’s prior $80 million Series B raise in January 2024.

ElevenLabs has built a cloud-based artificial intelligence platform that enables customers to generate synthetic speech for use in applications such as dubbing. It has built a library of more than 1,000 voices, organized into categories such as “confident,” “narrator” and “expressive.” Besides dubbing, other applications of its voices include the creation of audiobooks and narrating movies and shows.

In addition to its growing bank of synthetic voices, ElevenLabs is also capable of cloning people’s voices. Customers can upload a short speech sample of the target voice, and the platform will replicate that voice to say anything that the customer wants it to say. The startup says it only needs a one-minute audio file of a person speaking to create a basic clone of their voice, or 30 minutes to create a professional replica that’s indistinguishable from the real thing.

One compelling feature of its voice cloning capability is that it’s not limited to the speaker’s native language. It can translate its cloned voices into more than two dozen languages, and replicate various regional accents as well. So, a cloned voice could be used to dub the same movie in multiple languages. In addition, the technology can also preserve the original speaking style, tone and so on. Users also have tools to fine-tune its dubbed and cloned voices, so they can adjust the speaking style and clarity, for example.

The startup has made a few headlines due to the impressive nature of its platform. Earlier this month, it translated U.S. blogger Lex Friedman’s interview of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into English and Russian, retaining his authentic voice, with the same intonations, emotions and speech style for all three languages.

There has also been some controversy. Last week, the company was criticized by the daughter of the late French actor Alain Dorval after it broadcast content that included her father’s cloned voice.

Dorval, who passed away in February 2024, had provided the voice for the actor Sylvester Stallone in French-dubbed versions of movies such as “Rambo” and “Rocky.” ElevenLabs this month said it had recreated Dorval’s voice, and would be using it in the upcoming action movie “Armor.” However, Dorval’s daughter Aurore Bergé, who is France’s minister for sexual equality, accused the company of breaching an agreement that it would only clone his voice as a “trial” of the technology.

“I agreed to a trial. Just a trial. An agreement strictly guaranteeing that my mother and I would be in final validation before any use/publication,” Bergé said in a post on X. “And that nothing could be done without our agreement. I discover… on X that this commitment is not respected. I never approved such a broadcast. And my father would never have approved it as it was.”

ElevenLabs responded by saying that the “project is still underway” ahead of the movie’s March 2025 release and insisted that Dorval’s family will retain full control of his voice, and make the final decision on whether it’s used in the final version of the movie.

The startup, which makes its technology available via an application programming interface with a number of pricing tiers, claims customers including the text-to-video startup Synthesia Ltd., as well as publishers such as the Washington Post, HarperCollins Publishers LLC and Bertelsmann SE & Co., and a number of video game developers.

ElevenLabs’ competitors include startups such as Deepdub Ltd., as well as industry giants such as OpenAI and Google LLC.

Image: News/Freepik AI