ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski explains how tech defensibility works across research, product layers, and ecosystem moats.
Insight
Audio AI progress requires architectural breakthroughs rather than raw compute scale
“The main part that I think is different in audio space is that you don't need the scale as much as you need the, Architectural breakthroughs, the model breakthroughs to really make a dent.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2027
Voice conversational AI will pass the Turing test within a year
“I think this is, is good for customer support or customer experience, but it's still a way away from like conversation like we have and like passing that Turing test. So I think this is still like a, at least a year, like within a year. And then you will have …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: Cascaded voice architectures will dominate enterprise for 1–2 years
“And of course, depending on the use case, if you are, like, enterprise-reliable use case, the cascaded approach is the approach for the next year to...”
Assertion Supported
ElevenLabs reached $300M ARR, split evenly between self-serve and enterprise
“We are at three hundred million in, in, in ARR, which is roughly fifty-fifty between SelfServe, so a lot of subscription and creators using our creative platform, and then Approaching 50% on the enterprise side using our agents platform work, and that's on the…”
Assertion Supported
Ukraine's government partnered with ElevenLabs to build agentic public services
“Recently I went to Ukraine where we are working with Ministry of Transformation, where they are effectively creating a first agent in government, and the crazy thing is, they have all of those.”
Assertion Supported
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs' Scribe v2 hits 93.5% accuracy under 150ms latency
“We just released our speech-to-text model, Scribe v.II, which is under a 150 milliseconds, 93.5% accuracy across the top 30 languages on, on Flourers. And it's only top 30 here because we serve so many others, but most of the people don't. So so it's so it's b…”