ElevenLabs just hit $6.6B, but its CEO says the real money isn't in voice anymore

ElevenLabs has made a name for itself building realistic AI voices.

What started as two Polish engineers annoyed by terrible movie dubbing has grown into a profitable company now valued at $6.6 billion (elevenlabs.io/blog/announcing-an-employee-tender), doubling its valuation from just nine months ago. The company recently announced a $100 million tender offer led by Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from a16z and others, as its tech powers everything from Fortnite characters to customer service bots and goes toe-to-toe with OpenAI to become the default voice of AI.

Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a conversation with CEO Mati Staniszewski (techcrunch.com/2025/10/29/elevenlabs-ceo-says-…) from this year's Disrupt, where he made a surprising admission: he thinks voice models will be commoditized in just a couple of years. So what's ElevenLabs' plan when everyone else catches up?

Listen to the full episode to hear about:

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Why ElevenLabs is pivoting from just voice models to building a conversational AI agent platform

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How the company is tackling deepfakes with watermarking, AI detection, and device authentication

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Why Staniszewski believes there will soon be more AI-generated content than human content

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ElevenLabs' push into music generation and partnerships to fuse audio with video models

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