
- The AI investment rollercoaster continues to gather pace
- Voice AI/text-to-speech specialist ElevenLabs has raised $180m in its Series C round
- Deutsche Telekom and NTT Docomo are among its backers
The wind might have been knocked out of AI investor sails last week when the emergence of DeepSeek sent the stock markets into a tailspin, but there’s no sign that cash will dry up for AI developers and the companies building the datacentre infrastructure needed for AI workload processing – and telcos are getting in on the act.
The latest AI startup to bank fresh funding is ElevenLabs, which describes itself as “an AI research company, with a focus on driving development in the AI audio space”. Since it launched its platform in January 2023, ElevenLabs has “refined its voice AI models and introduced new products like Conversational AI, enabling real-time, natural speech for AI agents [for customer support and many other applications], and ElevenReader, a mobile app.” It even has a sound-effects model that generates sound effects from text descriptions (you have to wonder what ‘Wall Street crashing’ would sound like…) and offers audio dubbing in 32 languages. Its various technologies are “used by creators, developers, and businesses to power content creation, customer support, gaming, education, and accessibility, among others,” according to the startup, which claims its tools are used by employees at over 60% of Fortune 500 companies.
Now ElevenLabs has raised $180m in its Series C round of funding, which values the company at $3.3bn. A long list of private equity firms participated in the round, which was led by a16z (aka Andreessen Horowitz) and Iconiq Growth (you can see all the investor names in this blog). It has now raised a total of $281m.
ElevenLabs says it will use the funds from the new round to “drive the next stage of AI audio, supporting research into more expressive and controllable voice AI, expanding tools for developers and businesses scaling globally, and strengthening AI safety.”
The company also noted that it is teaming up with a number of “strategic investors” including Deutsche Telekom (via its investment arm T Capital) and NTT Docomo Ventures (as well as LG Technology Ventures, HubSpot Ventures and RingCentral Ventures).
NTT Docomo Ventures noted that the NTT Docomo Group is “looking into ways to use generative AI to facilitate global expansion in the entertainment domain, as well as in the field of next-generation communications. With this investment, we will deepen our collaboration with ElevenLabs and accelerate our efforts to develop solutions that utilise generative AI voice technology and to improve the customer experience”.
NTT Docomo Ventures highlighted the ability of ElevenLabs’ technology to “generate natural speech that is extremely close to the human voice. Whereas conventional text-to-speech technology has had difficulty expressing emotion and inflection, ElevenLabs’ unique architecture enables its platform to produce high-quality speech using less data than required for previous techniques, and it is capable of reproducing the speech styles and emotions of a variety of speakers.
“The company’s solutions are beginning to see use in a variety of applications… In the customer support field, the implementation of voice functionality in chatbots allows them to deal with customers just like a call centre, improving the customer experience and enhancing the efficiency of companies’ support,” it added.
- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV
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