ElevenLabs, the Polish-founded voice AI company, has crossed a major revenue milestone and is now moving beyond narration and dubbing into music production through a strategic partnership with Splice. The company ended 2025 at $350 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and surpassed $500 million ARR in the first four months of 2026, according to disclosures made in May 2026. This growth trajectory reflects the company's evolution from a text-to-speech startup into what it now describes as an AI-audio infrastructure layer serving creators, enterprises, and developers.

How Did ElevenLabs Grow From a Polish Dubbing Frustration Into a $11 Billion Company?

ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, two Polish high school friends who had worked together on weekend projects at Google and Palantir before launching the company. The origin story is surprisingly concrete: Piotr was about to watch a movie with his girlfriend, who did not speak English, and they were reminded of the poor-quality single-narrator dubbing they had experienced growing up in Poland. Rather than treating this as an abstract AI opportunity, they saw it as a real problem technology could solve.

The company's funding progression reveals how quickly it captured investor confidence. In January 2023, at public beta launch, ElevenLabs raised a $2 million pre-seed round. By January 2024, it had secured an $80 million Series B and launched multiple products including Dubbing Studio, Voice Library, and an early Reader app. By January 2025, the company raised $180 million at a $3.3 billion valuation. In February 2026, it raised $500 million at an $11 billion valuation. This acceleration reflects not just investor enthusiasm, but the company's ability to move from a single product into a diversified platform.

What Products Has ElevenLabs Built Beyond Text-to-Speech?

ElevenLabs' product roadmap shows a deliberate expansion strategy. The company began with highly realistic text-to-speech, then added voice cloning, dubbing, long-form editing workflows, and developer APIs. By 2026, it had expanded into speech-to-text, music generation, image and video tools, real-time conversational agents, and enterprise voice workflows. The company has organized these capabilities into three pillars: ElevenCreative for content creators, ElevenAgents for enterprise and customer operations, and ElevenAPI for developers.

What distinguishes ElevenLabs from other AI companies is that it did not start as a consumer toy and later figure out business applications. Instead, the company worked from the beginning on model quality, creator workflows, developer interfaces, enterprise deployment, and safety governance simultaneously. This focused approach helped it avoid becoming overshadowed by larger foundation-model companies that were spreading their attention across text, image, and video.

How Are ElevenLabs and Splice Changing Music Production?

In May 2026, Splice announced a partnership with ElevenLabs to develop AI-powered creative tools aimed at music producers and creators. The collaboration brings together Splice's royalty-free sample library and music production ecosystem with ElevenLabs' AI audio technology. The companies plan to launch these tools later in 2026, though specific product details have not yet been revealed.

The partnership represents a shift in how AI audio tools are deployed. Rather than operating as standalone applications, the new tools will integrate directly into music-making workflows. This approach mirrors how ElevenLabs has approached other markets: embedding AI capabilities into the tools creators already use, rather than asking them to adopt entirely new software.

"Our models deliver studio-grade audio ready for commercial use. By embedding them into Splice's workflow, we'll bring these capabilities directly to the artists and creators shaping the future of music," said Mati Staniszewski.

Mati Staniszewski, Co-founder and CEO at ElevenLabs

Splice has been expanding its AI capabilities for some time. Last month, the company introduced generative AI features focused on sample creation and discovery, while also emphasizing compensation systems for original sample creators. In December 2025, Splice partnered with Universal Music Group to develop commercial AI tools for creators. Earlier in 2026, Splice acquired Kits AI, an AI voice production platform.

What Strategic Advantages Did ElevenLabs' Founders Bring to the Company?

The complementary skills of Staniszewski and Dąbkowski shaped ElevenLabs' operating model. Piotr, who studied mathematics at Imperial College London and earned an MPhil from Cambridge, serves as the research and engineering engine, focusing on context understanding, emotional control, low latency, and multilingual robustness. Mati, whose background includes roles at Palantir, BlackRock, and Opera Software, leads deployment and commercialization, pushing models into real workflows for developers, creators, enterprises, and government users.

This division of labor became the company's competitive advantage. While major foundation-model labs were broadening into multimodality, ElevenLabs stayed intensely focused on audio, and that deliberate narrowness helped it avoid becoming overshadowed by larger competitors. In public appearances, Mati has become the more visible operator-founder, while Piotr has remained associated with the technical-founder archetype. In 2024, Piotr was included in TIME100 AI, centered on the technical power of ElevenLabs' lower-latency, higher-quality voice generation and dubbing systems.

Steps to Understanding ElevenLabs' Three-Pillar Product Strategy

• ElevenCreative: Designed for content creators, this pillar includes text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing, and long-form editing workflows that allow creators to produce professional-quality audio content without expensive studio equipment or hiring voice actors.
• ElevenAgents: Focused on enterprise and customer operations, this pillar provides real-time conversational agents and enterprise voice workflows that allow businesses to automate customer service, support, and internal communications at scale.
• ElevenAPI: Aimed at developers, this pillar offers application programming interfaces that allow engineers to embed ElevenLabs' audio capabilities into their own products, from mobile apps to web platforms to enterprise software.

By January 2024, ElevenLabs' technology was being used by employees at 41 percent of the Fortune 500. By January 2025, that figure had grown to over 60 percent of the Fortune 500. This enterprise adoption suggests that the company's focus on deployment, safety, and developer interfaces has resonated with large organizations seeking to integrate AI audio into their operations.

The Splice partnership signals that ElevenLabs' ambitions now extend into creative industries beyond dubbing and narration. Music production represents a new frontier for the company, one where its audio expertise can be applied to a different set of creator workflows and business models. As the company continues to expand its product architecture and raise capital at increasingly higher valuations, the question is whether it can maintain its focus on audio quality and user experience while competing in multiple markets simultaneously.