Language AI Startup ElevenLabs Valued at Over USD 3bn in Series C

For multilingual voice AI startup ElevenLabs, the new year is apparently off to a good start. According to a January 24, 2025 piece by TechCrunch and now confirmed by the company, ElevenLabs recently closed a Series C of USD 180m at a valuation between USD 3-3.3bn. AI dubbing is a key feature of the ElevenLabs platform.

According to TechCrunch, the round was led by ICONIQ Growth, with possible participation from Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz was also one of the lead investors in a January 2024 Series B that raised USD 80m.

The Series C comes on the heels of a major publicity win for ElevenLabs, just weeks after the company dubbed audio for MIT researcher-turned-podcaster Lex Fridman’s January 2025 interview with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Fridman, with more than four million followers on X, initially pitched Zelenskyy on conducting the three-hour conversation in Russian, “a language we are both fluent in,” which the host suggested would “result in the most […] deep, dynamic, and powerful conversation.”

Zelenskyy declined, and the episode was recorded in a mix of Russian, Ukrainian, and English. The podcast episode was released with dubs and subs for all three languages, in addition to the original mixed audio.

ElevenLabs was “thrilled to help make available” the conversation in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, the company noted on X. Co-founder Mati Staniszewski also thanked Fridman for the shoutout, adding, “Loved working together to bring your conversation with President Zelenskyy to multiple languages, while maintaining his authentic voice and delivery.” 

The January 2024 Series B catapulted ElevenLabs to “unicorn” status, which a number of language AI companies have also recently achieved, perhaps most notably DeepL, valued at USD 2bn in May 2024. Enterprise generative AI startup Writer, meanwhile, celebrated a valuation of USD 1.9bn in November 2024.

The two to three billion dollar mark seems to become a benchmark for fast-scaling language AI application startups. Synthesia, for example, an AI multilingual video generation platform that includes a dubbing feature; raised USD 180m in a Series D funding round in January 2025 that valued the business at 2.1bn.

Naturally, the world’s Hyperscalers continue to invest in their own AI voice features and services, from YouTube’s AI dubbing (live as of December 2024) to Amazon’s efforts to improve lip sync in AI dubbing.

ElevenLabs currently offers voice cloning and dubbing in 32 languages, according to the company’s website. Its dubbing studio allows users to explore text-to-speech capabilities, in addition to a “voice changer” and voice-enabled special effects, with the suite collectively marketed as “AI audio tools.”