The Ledger
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ElevenLabs built its own data centers for training AI models
“So we've built our own data centers for training, and then for inference, we of course use some of our great partners across across the traditional.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs' Eastern European team worked harder than US West Coast hires
“I think you can find people that want to work harder, and we've had it actually at some point a team where we hired some people from west coast of US and our people where we have quite a few from central eastern Europe where like, oh yeah, they don't work actu…”
Staniszewski: LLM Progression Is Flattening While Voice AI Progresses Rapidly
“In voice, you still will see Pretty, pretty, pretty quick curve. On the lamps, I agree, it's probably a little bit flattening to some extent.”
ElevenLabs speech-to-text beats OpenAI and Gemini on benchmarks
“Then speech to text is beating open AI, Gemini on benchmarks.”
Staniszewski: Enterprise partner beat ElevenLabs to AI dubbing launch in 2023
“One of the enterprise clients, we told them that we are planning to launch our dubbing solution, combining those components later, later in that, it was it was, I think September later in that, that month. And they took the components and released dubbing two …”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs holds a 6 to 12 month research lead over competitors
“I think it depends on the use case, but six to 12 months, I would say.”
Staniszewski: Owning data centers breaks even within two years versus renting compute
“In our case, it was if we assume we continue training the models that the way we want to. So very continuously, a lot of those models. Then second for the data transfers, and as we think about continuously bringing more data we will likely on a two year horizo…”
ElevenLabs is considering acquiring a company worth hundreds of millions
“One that, that is, we are considering is an acquisition of another company now, which is a big company. And that company, you know, is in hundreds of millions of dollars.”
ElevenLabs Reaches $200M ARR, Doubling Revenue in 10 Months
“So we crossed two hundred million now. 20 months to hundred, and then 10 months to 200.”
Staniszewski: OpenAI will definitely enter the AI voice market
“They definitely will, but I think they, you know, they lack the...”
Staniszewski: New AI Models Will Not Drastically Improve Audiobook Narration
“In narration, we think it's plateauing. You, the new model generations will not make narration of an audiobook drastically different. It will still be, it will be still in a similar quality”
ElevenLabs employs 5 to 10 of world's top 100 voice AI researchers
“Piotr and people around him were able, so Piotr was able to assemble one of the best teams in the space. I think we have five to 10 people that are in the top In a top hundred”
Staniszewski: Tech giants pay for AI talent to acquire model architecture know-how
“As I think about meta and others, they are of course paying for the know-how as much as they are paying for the raw talent too, where getting those early people gets you some insight into the models and architecture that you can then bring across and accelerat…”
Staniszewski: Continuous fundraising mode is destructive for startup founders
“I think it's a waste of time to, Kind of be in this, like, continuous fundraising mode. It's, you know, destructive. You need to have conversation. It's not useful.”
Staniszewski: Founders Should Value Investor Partnership Over a 20% Valuation Bump
“I don't like founders that are trying to do that too much. Like that if they are trying to get you to get the first time sheet to bump the other ones, I think it's a wrong approach. I think you should like, it's, you know, okay. If it's like order of magnitude…”
Staniszewski: US VCs focus on betting bigger rather than downside protection
“So I think they are playing a different game. I think the, you know, they're, they are all from our experience so far, a lot more keen to take the risk. Like, You know, even our conversations are always like, how do we bet bigger rather than like optimize for …”
Enterprise Client Made Tens of Millions From Intern-Built ElevenLabs Hack
“So they gave it to their intern and they, the intern has built that project and then it exploded, but it was, it did give them like in tens of millions of revenue over, over that period of time.”
Staniszewski: AI model cost declines will validate weak application-layer unit economics
“The unit economics in most of those cases that you mentioned is pretty, pretty poor, but I think the strategy is that yes, one, the models will optimize in cost, and then two, they will be the brands that customers trust, and then they can actually use a lot o…”
Staniszewski: Launch horizontal for novel tech, vertical when domain expertise exists
“I think if you're launching something very new, very different, and you don't yet fully know, you know, like, a subset of customer base, but you know that there is a bigger one, I think horizontal is, is completely fine. If you know, and you have domain expert…”
Staniszewski: Fire new hires immediately if unsure during first weeks
“If you are not unsure in the interview, but let's say you are bringing them, giving them a chance, and you are not sure in the first weeks or months, you should separate straight away, rather than keep giving, giving the chance.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs voice agents can become a multi-billion dollar revenue business
“It's interesting because it's on the relative basis, I think the, our agents work is, is, is already huge, but I think it's just scratching the surface. I think it's going to, if we play it right, it's like a multi-billion dollar revenue generating business ju…”
ElevenLabs' Largest Enterprise Contract Is Approximately $2 Million
“Our biggest contract is around two million, and they are mostly in a call center, Customer support, personal assistance base.”
Staniszewski: Voice is becoming the primary interface for surrounding technology
“How now the interaction is shifting, where voice is this big interface for the technology around us.”
Staniszewski: Only 50 to 100 top voice AI researchers exist globally
“The number of researchers in the world working on voice and being exceptional is super small. Probably like 50 to a hundred people at like this top level”
ElevenLabs raised its pre-seed round at a $9M post-money valuation
“Nine million post. The amount was exactly 11% of the equity that, that, that the first investor was buying, and then the other ones were layered in.”
Staniszewski: Every funding round must tie directly into a product launch
“Our philosophy was always the round should have another purpose, which is Bring the product out and help you get the product into the users and celebrate a set of customers to show that you are arrived in a specific sector bring a new research model into play.…”
Staniszewski: Test investors with specific requests before accepting a term sheet
“Where you do get the interest from investors, I think this is the best time to actually test whether they can be helpful. And before you accept any term sheet, any money, it's like, Now, can you help me with angels that you want on cap table? Do you want the i…”
Staniszewski: Nat Friedman was the only investor to test ElevenLabs' APIs
“Which was the only investor ever to do that was, so I tested your APIs and this thing doesn't work. This works. Voice here wasn't good. A stability wasn't very clear parameter. So he was the only person that tested our APIs, decided that it was actually valuab…”
Staniszewski: a16z connected ElevenLabs with celebrities before investing
“A-sixteen Z was phenomenal. They did exactly what we spoke about, which was, they've shown us that they cared before they invested. They introduced us to incredible people, to some celebrities to work on the voice licensing. So they were like on it for two wee…”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs Pitched Lower-Priority VCs First to Test Pitch Messaging
“The way we approach fundraising was always, you know, especially in the early days, like, queue, queue investors we really care about, and First speak with maybe one or two that maybe aren't a priority so we understand whether, like, we are at all kind of perc…”
ElevenLabs has 250 employees split into roughly 20 small teams
“As an organization today, we are, you know, we're 250 people, but really it's more like 20 teams couldn't go to market of like five to 10 people that are just executing on specific project where where They have higher ownership.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs will cultivate local European talent over US executives
“We want to grow talent here.”
Staniszewski: European startups must build from Europe, not for Europe
“I think you want to be able to build from Europe, but not built only for Europe. And I think those two get conflated where sometimes building from Europe meant, okay, you are building for European ecosystem, which isn't the right thing. You still want the glob…”
ElevenLabs reached $35M ARR by the end of 2023
“The end of twenty-twenty-three, I think we were between 35, 35? Thirty-five million.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs raised at 30x revenue at $80M ARR
“Well, it was, you know, I think the first, so we did the round in October of 24, so we were probably at 80 when we got the docs, and then it was signed then. We, so the way we approached any of the fundraisers, it's, can we bring some of the bets forward? In t…”
ElevenLabs offers employee secondary sales in almost every funding round
“Almost every round we can, we do secondary and a tender offer for all employees that have vested stock so they can sell the stock.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs V3 combines reasoning and speech in a multimodal architecture
“Over what is now more of a theme where you kind of train a more of a multimodal approach where you combine a reasoning and speech together to create even better speech experience. So that's our most recent generation is effectively that the Releven v. Free.”
ElevenLabs lacked product-market fit until pivoting from dubbing to voiceovers
“When we worked on dubbing and the first early days, and we were like emailing, we didn't have product, product market fit. It was like very clear that, you know, people were slow to reply, then we sent samples, they weren't engaging, so we didn't through the 2…”
Staniszewski: Optimize angel investors for missing domain and go-to-market expertise
“On angels, we would usually optimize for do they have domain expertise that we don't have? That's one category. Second, can they help us validate ourselves in specific, specific circles we might not have access to? So like if you are an AI founder, it's maybe …”
ElevenLabs grew headcount from under 100 to 250 in seven months
“Scaling the company from less than a hundred to now, 250 in a span of seven months while keeping culture intact.”
Staniszewski: Early YouTuber outreach for AI dubbing yielded lackluster interest
“There's like roughly, it was like, 15% reply rate initially from the first batches that we sent. I mean, we sent thousands of them. But the interest was like lackluster. All of them were, it's like, oh, I don't fully believe this is possible.”