ElevenLabs Reveals New Investors Including BlackRock and Jamie Foxx
ElevenLabs Reveals New Investors Including BlackRock and Jamie Foxx Voice AI startup ElevenLabs is turning a niche technology into a major business, drawing in Wall Street giants and Hollywood celebrities as it races to define how humans interact with machines.
What just happened?
ElevenLabs has disclosed a new slate of backers in its $500 million Series D round, adding heavyweight institutional investors like BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, and Schroders, alongside corporates such as NVIDIA, Salesforce, Santander, KPN, and Deutsche Telekom, and celebrities including Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk.1 The company says it has now surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up from nearly $350 million at the end of last year.2
Why investors care
From the capital markets’ perspective, ElevenLabs is becoming a high‑growth infrastructure bet. The company’s valuation has jumped from $6.6 billion last September to $11 billion by February, reflecting rapid revenue expansion and investor confidence in voice AI as a “critical interface” for digital services.1 The firm also ran a $100 million secondary tender — its second in roughly six months — providing liquidity to early shareholders.1
Why enterprises care
Large customers are treating voice as a mission‑critical channel. Deutsche Telekom, along with Revolut and Klarna, has signed enterprise contracts with ElevenLabs in the past quarter.1 Karine Peters of Deutsche Telekom’s T. Capital called voice “the highest-stakes channel for any customer interaction” and argued that ElevenLabs is “becoming a foundational enabler of Deutsche Telekom’s broader Industrial AI vision,” from “voice-as-a-service to multilingual automation and in-network AI agents.”1
Why the tech matters
Co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski has stressed that consumers “won’t trust systems that sound robotic or interact strangely,” pushing the company to build “human-level AI voice models.”1 To that end, ElevenLabs recently acquired the team from Polish voice AI startup Papla to strengthen its research bench.1
With institutional investors, telecom giants, fintechs, and entertainment figures all betting on its growth, ElevenLabs is positioning itself not just as a tool for synthetic voices, but as core infrastructure for the next generation of AI-powered customer interactions.
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