AI agency ElevenLabs achieves $100 million valuation inside months of launch
A
London-based AI startup that launched earlier this yr has already reached a $100 million valuation in recent indicators buyers are pouring in money to snap up shares within the nascent expertise.
ElevenLabs, which makes use of artificial intelligence to generate audio for dubbing movies into totally different languages, has no workplace and up till just lately had fewer than ten staff. But it has already achieved a $19 million funding spherical backed by the likes of VC large Andreessen Horowitz and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, valuing it at round $99 million.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder of ElevenLabs, advised the Standard: “When we were pitching with investors in 2022, most of them were still focusing on crypto and the metaverse but there was no clear interest in AI – the whole market thought this was not the best time.
“But a lot of people have become more aware of AI technology and some of the benefits it can offer so people were more keen to innovate and experiment and it was significantly easier for us to speak with investors.
“We were very lucky with timing in terms of the general field maturing.”
It comes after Paris-based AI agency Mistral raised over 100 million euros simply weeks after it was arrange, valuing it at simply shy of 1 / 4 of a billion euros.
Russ Mould, funding director at AJ Bell, stated: “My guess is AI now is where say the internet was 25 years ago – new, fascinating, potentially terrifying and lots of firms looking to get a piece of the action, either to defend their existing business model or to demolish and disrupt someone else’s. There will be big winners and there will be big losers.
“No-one, but no-one, knows which will be which, so the policy that many adapt will be to spread their capital around and see if they can find one or two of the potential gems.”
Rishi Sunak has placed artificial intelligence front and centre of his plans to grow the UK economy, organising an ‘AI taskforce’ and earlier this month asserting the UK can be host to the primary international AI summit.
At a speech to London Tech Week final week, he stated he needed to make the UK “not just the intellectual home but the geographical home of global AI.”
“We are going to seize the extraordinary potential of AI to improve people’s lives,” he stated.
Speaking on the Fintech Week London convention, City minister Andrew Griffith stated: “We want to encourage investment in higher risk, early-stage companies, those that face the biggest challenges in accessing funding.
“The explosion of interest in AI over the past six months has propelled it into every boardroom and to the centre of government.
“The UK government’s vision is for the UK to be one of the world’s leading nations in the development and commercial application of AI.”
ElevenLabs hopes to improve the decades-old movie dubbing trade through the use of text-to-speech and voice cloning software program to supply compelling, wealthy and lifelike voices.
“Being from Poland, one of the things you experience at the cinema is you rely on a single voice narrator to deliver all the lines in the movie,” Staniszewski stated.
“We realise that if you stretch in the future, all the content out there will be delivered in a significantly different way.”
The agency, which just lately expanded to a workforce of 15, hopes to make use of the funding to develop to a employees of 30 by the tip of the yr.