• Voice AI specialist ElevenLabs raises $500m
• Telenor reports full year growth
• Telus brokers AI factory partnership

In today’s industry news roundup: Deutsche Telekom partner ElevenLabs is valued at $11bn; Telenor believes it has delivered on its promises; Telus opens its AI factory to SMEs; and more!

New York and London-based voice AI developer ElevenLabs, which has models that operate across 70 languages, has raised $500m in a Series D funding round, led by Sequoia Capital, that values the company at $11bn. ElevenLabs, which has in the past attracted investments and support from a broad range of companies including Deutsche Telekom, KPN and Liberty Global, also noted it ended 2025 with an annual revenue run rate (ARR) of more than $330m, “driven by rapid enterprise adoption by companies like Deutsche Telekom, Square, the Ukrainian government, and Revolut for customer support, conversational commerce, citizen engagement, internal training, and inbound sales.” Piotr Dabkowski, co-founder of ElevenLabs, stated: “We started by building a voice that could sound human… [and] today we are building foundational models across the full audio stack – text to speech, transcription, music, dubbing and conversational models with a world-leading research team.”

The Telenor team is happy with its 2025 performance, which saw organic service revenues grow by 2% to 61.19bn Norwegian krone (NOK) ($6.32bn) and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) grow by 3.9% to NOK34.36bn ($3.56bn). CEO Benedicte Schilbred Fasmer stated: “The results for 2025 show that we are delivering on our promises. We are entering 2026 with a simplified portfolio and strengthened financial capacity. I am very proud of the strong efforts of our employees throughout the year, how we continue to put our customers first every day and develop services that provide greater security and add value to people’s everyday lives.” 

Canadian telco Telus and L-SPARK have teamed up to provide startups and innovators with access to the Telus Sovereign AI Factory – which it describes as “Canada’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer” – to “address a critical barrier facing Canadian AI startups: Access to high-performance compute infrastructure without relocating or building on foreign platforms.” Telus noted: “This collaboration marks a significant step forward in enabling Canada’s startup and innovation ecosystem by providing them access to the same enterprise-grade computing infrastructure available to large organisations. By making this same technology available, regardless of business size, Telus and L-SPARK are creating a new pathway for Canadian companies to build cutting-edge AI solutions, scale domestically and compete globally – all while keeping everything under Canadian control and jurisdiction.”

It’s been a busy week for Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), after the UK telco announced a new collaboration with payment network company Affirm to bring flexible payments and hardware financing to O2 mobile customers. The partnership will see Affirm offering new and existing O2 customers flexible payment options for mobile phones and other hardware, such as headphones and game consoles, through a range of monthly payment plans. The partnership, news of which comes shortly after VMO2’s announcement that it has teamed up with Zinkworks for AI network monitoring, will go live in the summer, subject to approval from financial regulators.

– The staff, TelecomTV