ElevenLabs has closed a $300 million employee tender offer that values the London-based voice AI company at $22 billion, the company said Wednesday. That is double the valuation it got in its Series D in February, and ElevenLabs credits much of the jump to businesses putting its conversational agents to work.
Wellington and T. Rowe Price led the round. BDT & MSD, EQT, GIC, Goldman Sachs, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Sapphire Ventures bought in for the first time, alongside existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Lightspeed, D.E. Shaw and Alkeon. Because it was a tender, the money went to employees selling shares rather than into the company. ElevenLabs said it wants to give its staff, now more than 800 people, “regular opportunities for liquidity.”
Agents drive the growth
Enterprise customers now account for 55% of revenue. The company’s ElevenAgents platform handles more than 15 million conversations a week, three times the February volume, and its annual recurring revenue has more than tripled over the same stretch. ElevenLabs said a recent analysis of its customers found voice agents resolve issues 31% faster than chat agents on average.
Since February, Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, DoorDash’s SevenRooms, Admiral, Customers Bank, Cadence and the governments of Ukraine and Greece have rolled the agents out across sales, support and operations. (Deutsche Telekom’s move to replace phone menus with AI agents is one example.) The company says its technology runs in daily operations at five of the world’s ten largest tech companies, five of the ten largest insurers and four of the ten largest telecom operators. Typical jobs include refunds and exchanges, insurance renewals, phone plan upgrades and booking healthcare appointments.
“We’re already seeing rapid adoption of expressive voice agents by enterprises and governments, who are deploying them in service of consumers and citizens,” co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski said in the announcement.
Emma Norchet of T. Rowe Price pointed to the company’s control of research, product and deployment. “The team is able to make improvements at every layer of the stack, allowing them to execute at high velocity and deliver immediate value for its enterprise clients,” she said.
From a $9 million round to new models
Staniszewski and CTO Piotr Dabkowski raised ElevenLabs’ first round in 2022 at a $9 million valuation, alongside its first text-to-speech model. The tender news landed just after the release of Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, which the company calls its fastest and most emotive models and says already lead independent benchmarks. Its models speak, listen and translate in more than 90 languages, and it recently added Scribe v2 Medical, a transcription model built for healthcare.
The Financial Times and Reuters also reported the deal. ElevenLabs says the number of companies using ElevenAgents for multichannel support, covering phone, chat and email in one conversation, has doubled since February.
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