ElevenLabs Doubles Valuation to $22 Billion
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ElevenLabs is doubling its valuation faster than most people install a software update: a secondary sale now puts the voice AI company at $22 billion, just months after its $11 billion Series D.
The AI audio company has just announced that it closed a $300 million employee tender offer. The transaction was led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price. EQT, Goldman Sachs, GIC, OTPP, Sapphire Ventures and BDT & MSD invested for the first time. Existing backers such as Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, ICONIQ, D.E. Shaw, Evantic, DISRUPTIVE and Alkeon also took part.
What a Secondary Sale Means
In a tender offer, employees sell existing shares to new or current investors. The company receives no fresh capital from the sale, though the transaction sets a new price for the shares. ElevenLabs now has more than 800 employees and says it wants to offer them liquidity on a regular basis. About a year ago, the company ran a secondary sale at a $6.6 billion valuation, when annual recurring revenue (ARR) stood at $200 million. Earlier this year came the $500 million Series D at an $11 billion valuation, with ARR above $330 million at the end of 2025.
From Voice Models to an Agent Platform
According to the company, the valuation is driven by its conversational agents business. ElevenAgents, its platform for voice and chat agents, has more than tripled its ARR since the Series D. The agents now handle more than 15 million conversations a week, three times as many as at the start of the year. Enterprise customers account for 55 percent of revenue. Named customers include Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, SevenRooms, Admiral and the governments of Ukraine and Greece. At the same time, ElevenLabs released its text-to-speech models Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo. The announcement does not give an updated total ARR figure. Estimates from the spring put it at around $500 million, which would imply a valuation multiple of about 44 at $22 billion. Critics point out that a tender offer comes without the disclosure requirements of a funding round.
Competition and Open Questions
ElevenLabs competes with large players such as OpenAI and Google, which are building their own voice features and voice cloning tools. Specialized providers such as Cartesia and Deepgram add to the pressure, aiming to win on latency and infrastructure for voice agents.
Legal headwinds exist as well. This spring, seven journalists, voice actors and podcasters in Illinois filed a class action against ElevenLabs. They allege that the company extracted biometric voiceprints from publicly available recordings without consent and used them to train commercial models. The suit rests on the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. Similar suits target several big tech companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia. ElevenLabs did not address the allegations in its valuation announcement, and the cases remain open.
What Comes Next
ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski. According to media reports, the company aims to be ready for an IPO within two to three years. Until then, tender offers are likely to remain a central tool for giving employees liquidity and resetting the share price.
