Human
ElevenLabs lists BlackRock, Jamie Foxx and Eva Longoria as new investors
ElevenLabs reveals new investors, hits $500M ARR, and expands enterprise footprint as voice AI becomes a critical interface.
2 days ago
ElevenLabs’ latest funding update reads less like a startup cap table and more like a Hollywood–Wall Street crossover: the fast‑rising voice AI company has packed BlackRock, Nvidia, Deutsche Telekom, and Jamie Foxx into the same round, all while claiming it has blown past $500 million in recurring revenue.
From February’s megaround to May’s name‑drop
Back in February, ElevenLabs announced a $500 million Series D, pegging its valuation at a lofty $11 billion and extending a run that saw it jump from $6.6 billion just five months earlier. At the time, headlines focused on the size of the raise and its marquee venture backer, Sequoia.
The company has now returned to fill in the missing detail that really animates late‑stage AI deals: who else got in.
In early May, ElevenLabs revealed a broadened investor roster for that Series D, explicitly naming BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, and Schroders on the institutional side; Nvidia, Salesforce, Santander, KPN, and Deutsche Telekom on the corporate side; and celebrities Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong‑hyuk among individual backers.
The company framed the update as the closing of the circle around its already‑announced fundraise — a way to signal that the voice AI boom isn’t just a venture capital story, but one pulling in asset‑management giants, telcos, and pop‑culture figures.
The revenue rocket: from $330M to $500M+ ARR
Underpinning the investor frenzy is raw growth. ElevenLabs ended last year with “nearly $350 million in ARR,” according to earlier disclosures about crossing the $330 million mark. Co‑founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski then said the company added $100 million in net new ARR in the first quarter of 2026, closing Q1 at roughly $450 million.
Now the company says it has pushed past $500 million in Annual Recurring Revenue, a psychological and strategic milestone that places a still‑private AI startup into the revenue league of mature software players.
If those figures hold up under future scrutiny, they suggest an almost brutal pace of enterprise adoption for a company that only recently emerged as a category name in synthetic voice. The numbers also help justify the vertiginous valuation climb from $6.6 billion last September to $11 billion in February.
Enterprise contracts change the stakes
The shift in who is paying for ElevenLabs — and why — is just as important as how much they’re paying.
Over the past quarter, the company has signed enterprise contracts with Deutsche Telekom, Revolut, and Klarna, among others. For investors, that signals less experimental tinkering and more production use cases where AI voices sit in front of millions of end‑customers.
Deutsche Telekom, through its venture arm T. Capital, has been especially vocal. Managing director Karine Peters called voice “the highest-stakes channel for any customer interaction,” arguing that the bar on “quality, latency, and security is extremely high.” In her view, ElevenLabs is “not just a category leader – it 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.
That endorsement sketches the bullish thesis: if call centers, support flows, and in‑app guidance all move toward AI‑generated speech, whoever owns the “voice layer” could end up as critical infrastructure.
Voice, but make it “human‑level”
Inside ElevenLabs’ own narrative, the technical bar it has set for itself is explicit. Staniszewski has stressed that consumers will not trust systems that sound robotic or “interact strangely.” The company’s answer is to build what it calls “human-level AI voice models,” aiming for indistinguishability from natural speech not just in tone, but in pacing, emotion, and interaction.
To accelerate that push, ElevenLabs recently acquired the team from Polish voice AI startup Papla, folding additional research talent into its growing operation.
Taken together — aggressive revenue growth, deep‑pocketed investors, enterprise deployments, and a research‑heavy roadmap — the company is trying to position itself as the default infrastructure layer for voice‑driven AI.
The money shuffle: tenders and retail investors
The funding picture isn’t just about new money coming in; it’s also about who gets liquidity on the way up.
Alongside the Series D, ElevenLabs closed a $100 million tender offer — its second in about six months, after a similar tender last September. That mechanism lets early employees and investors sell some of their shares without waiting for an IPO, a sign that demand from new backers is high enough to support secondary transactions at these valuations.
In a blog post, Staniszewski also said the company plans to give retail investors an opportunity to invest in ElevenLabs through Robinhood Ventures, though he stopped short of detailing how the program will work. If it materializes, that would push ElevenLabs further into the public spotlight and test retail appetite for late‑stage private AI bets.
Wall Street, Big Tech, and Hollywood: why they’re piling in
The roster of new participants in the Series D reads like a cross‑section of the modern power structure.
- Asset managers like BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, and Schroders are effectively betting that voice AI becomes a durable, long‑term layer of digital infrastructure, not a passing fad.
- Corporate investors such as Nvidia, Salesforce, Santander, KPN, and Deutsche Telekom see strategic upside: GPUs and cloud, CRM and customer engagement, fintech and banking interfaces, telecom networks, and industrial automation all stand to gain if synthetic voice becomes a primary interface.
- Celebrities including Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Hwang Dong‑hyuk bring cultural gravity — and perhaps an eye on IP monetization and synthetic performances as AI voices and likenesses permeate entertainment.
For ElevenLabs, that diversity offers both capital and distribution: deep pools of money, enterprise channels, and potential content and marketing partners.
The bullish case: a new interface era
Supporters argue that voice is quietly becoming the interface of the post‑app era. Instead of tapping through menus, users talk to services; instead of waiting on hold, they converse with AI agents that can resolve issues instantly.
Add in ElevenLabs’ claim that it is already above $500 million in ARR and growing triple‑digit millions year over year, and the company starts to look less like a speculative lab and more like a scaled infrastructure provider riding a structural shift in how people interact with software.
In that framing, the presence of BlackRock and Nvidia in the same round is less surprising than it first appears: one represents the financial plumbing of global markets, the other the hardware engine of generative AI. Both are positioning themselves at choke points of the emerging stack; ElevenLabs wants to own the voice layer of that same stack.
The uneasy questions: trust, ethics, and concentration
But the very strengths that make ElevenLabs attractive to investors — hyper‑realistic voices, massive reach, enterprise integration — also sharpen the risks.
If consumers “won’t trust systems that sound robotic or interact strangely,” as Staniszewski puts it, there is an obvious corollary: perfectly human‑sounding systems are easier to trust — and to abuse. Voice cloning scandals, deepfake scams, and synthetic political messaging have already forced regulators and platforms to scramble. A dominant player in ultra‑realistic voice tech will draw even closer scrutiny.
There is also the question of power concentration. A single company, backed by some of the largest financial and corporate institutions in the world, racing to own the global voice layer raises familiar worries: pricing power over smaller developers, dependency risks for enterprises, and an incentive to move faster than policy and safeguards.
Finally, the liquidity moves — repeated tenders, a possible retail‑investment window — point to a company aware of its own hype cycle. Early shareholders are already partially cashing out; everyday investors may soon be invited in, right as valuations soar. Whether the underlying adoption keeps pace with expectations will determine if this is the next cloud‑scale platform, or another AI rocket that burns too hot.
What happens next
The near‑term roadmap is clear: deepen enterprise penetration, scale the research effort with hires like the Papla team, and translate that $500 million‑plus ARR into durable, diversified revenue streams.
The longer‑term question is whether ElevenLabs can become what Deutsche Telekom’s Karine Peters calls a “foundational enabler” of industrial and customer‑facing AI — without becoming a foundational headache for regulators, competitors, and the public sphere.
For now, though, the message from investors is unmistakable: if the future talks, they expect ElevenLabs to be the one doing the speaking.