ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs is a voice AI company that builds text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice cloning, and voice-agent infrastructure used by developers, publishers, and enterprises. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google engineer Piotr Dabkowski and ex-Palantir PM Mati Staniszewski, it now runs at a $330M ARR and a $11B valuation.
On Feb 4, 2026 it closed a $500M Series D led by Sequoia at an $11B valuation, more than tripling a year prior. The current slate drives the momentum: Scribe v2 Realtime STT at 150ms latency, Conversational AI 2.0, the Eleven v3 Conversational TTS, and the 11.ai MCP voice assistant.
Indie AI subtitle workflows feed Scribe's word-level timestamps plus speaker diarization into Gemini to cut videos — compressing a full film down to a ~12KB structured transcript the model can reason over, instead of burning 45M tokens on raw frames. The same STT rails now power IBM watsonx Orchestrate voice agents in the enterprise.
Think of it as the AWS of voice: one account gets you a studio mic, a transcriber, a live translator, and a voice agent line.
Search Interest
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Nascent0–7 days
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Emergent8–30 days
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Validating31–90 days
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Rising91–180 days
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Established ← now180 days +
Why is it emerging now?
ElevenLabs closed a $500M Sequoia-led Series D at $11B in Feb 2026 on $330M ARR, then shipped Scribe v2 Realtime (150ms STT), Eleven v3 Conversational TTS, and the 11.ai MCP voice assistant within two quarters. IBM embedded the stack into watsonx Orchestrate in March.
Outlook
6-month signal projection and commercial timeline.
IBM partnership and Sequoia-led $500M Series D position it as the default voice stack; IPO track telegraphed by CEO.
Risk · OpenAI's GPT-realtime voice API and Google Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS are both closing the quality gap at lower latency.
Analogs · OpenAI Whisper · Deepgram · PlayHT
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nowSaturated brand, SERP owned
Official docs, pricing, and vendor pages rank 1-10; affiliate surface is thin but exists.
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3-6moAlternative and vs pages land
Deepgram/OpenAI comparison pages and voice-agent how-tos are the open lane for new sites.
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6-12moIPO narrative peaks
Public-market coverage lifts branded search; enterprise review content matures.
Competition & Opportunity for term “ElevenLabs”
Three heuristic signals derived from the tracked queries, the term's monetization cards, and its cluster neighbors. Directional, not audited.
Ideas for term “ElevenLabs”
Buildable pitches — turn this term into an article, site, product, post, newsletter, video, or course. Steal any card and run with it.
Head-to-head on Scribe v2, Deepgram Nova-3, and OpenAI's realtime voice. Latency, language coverage, pricing, streaming quirks. High commercial intent.
Autocomplete's #4 tail is 'elevenlabs pricing'. Break down per-character vs per-minute pricing, overage behavior, and Scribe v2 Realtime per-minute costs.
Walkthrough of Agents SDK, barge-in, turn-taking, and MCP tool wiring. Ship an appointment-booking agent end to end.
Covers PlayHT, Deepgram, Cartesia, Rime, OpenAI, Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS. Buyer-intent query with durable traffic.
Wrap Scribe v2 word-level timestamps + Gemini reasoning into a one-click SRT/ASS generator. Validated by indie workflows already doing this by hand.
Input daily call volume, avg minute length, languages. Output ElevenLabs vs Deepgram+OpenAI vs Twilio+Polly landed cost.
Side-by-side call transcripts, CSAT impact, failure modes. Visual, episodic, affiliate-friendly.
When Sequoia writes a $500M Series D and IBM bakes you into watsonx in the same quarter, the voice-API category has a default winner.
Switched from frame-by-frame to word-level timestamp transcripts. Cost dropped by a factor of 1,000.
Siri reads calendars; 11.ai opens Linear, files a ticket, Slacks your PM, and researches a lead in one spoken command.
What People Search
Long-tail queries from Google Suggest + Trends. Volume and competition are heuristics — directional, not audited. Content Type comes from query shape.
SERP of term “ElevenLabs”
What searchers see today — organic results on top, paid ads if anyone's bidding. Ad density is a real-time commercial signal.
FAQ
What is ElevenLabs?
ElevenLabs is a voice AI company that builds text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice cloning, and voice-agent infrastructure used by developers, publishers, and enterprises.
Why is ElevenLabs emerging now?
ElevenLabs closed a $500M Sequoia-led Series D at $11B in Feb 2026 on $330M ARR, then shipped Scribe v2 Realtime (150ms STT), Eleven v3 Conversational TTS, and the 11.ai MCP voice assistant within two quarters. IBM embedded the stack into watsonx Orchestrate in March.
When did ElevenLabs emerge?
Publicly emerged around 2023-01-31 (about 1232 days ago as of 2026-06-16). EarlyTerms first recorded a pipeline signal on 2026-04-20.
Related Terms
Other terms in the same space — aliases, subtypes, competitors, and neighbors to explore next.
- Competitor gemini-3-1-flash-tts Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS is Google DeepMind's text-to-speech model that generates expressive speech in 70+ languages, steered by 200+ audio… →
- Related model-context-protocol Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open, JSON-RPC-2.0-based standard that defines how AI applications talk to external tools, data, and… →
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Sources
Primary URLs this report cites — open any to verify the claim yourself.
- 01 ElevenLabs — Series D announcement elevenlabs.io ↗
- 02 TechCrunch — $500M Series D at $11B techcrunch.com ↗
- 03 ElevenLabs — Scribe v2 Realtime in Agents elevenlabs.io ↗
- 04 The Decoder — 11.ai launch the-decoder.com ↗
- 05 IBM Newsroom — ElevenLabs + watsonx Orchestrate newsroom.ibm.com ↗
- 06 HN — Conversational AI 2.0 thread news.ycombinator.com ↗
- 07 Wikipedia — ElevenLabs en.wikipedia.org ↗