Key Points
- British AI company ElevenLabs has reached a $22bn valuation after completing a $300m employee tender offer.
- The new valuation is double the $11bn valuation established in the company’s $500m Series D funding round in February 2026.
- The tender offer was led by Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price.
- New investors included Goldman Sachs, EQT, GIC, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Sapphire Ventures and BDT & MSD.
- Existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed and ICONIQ, Q also participated.
- The transaction allowed employees and existing shareholders to sell shares without the company raising conventional fresh capital.
- ElevenLabs said enterprise customers now account for 55 per cent of its revenue.
- Its ElevenAgents platform handles more than 15 million conversations every week, three times February’s level.
- The company employs more than 800 people and operates across 20 countries, with London remaining its largest base.
- ElevenLabs has released Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo, while its technology supports more than 90 languages.
- Customers and users cited by ElevenLabs include Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, Admiral, SevenRooms, Customers Bank and Cadence, as well as the governments of Ukraine and Greece.
- ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski.
- Business Matters reporter Amy Ingham reported that the latest valuation places ElevenLabs among the world’s most valuable AI labs.
- Reuters, in a report by Pragyan Kalita, said the company’s voice agents are increasingly being used for customer service and routine operational tasks.
- City A.M. reporter Saskia Koopman reported that the valuation represents another major increase for one of Britain’s rapidly growing AI companies.
- TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin described the transaction as another employee liquidity event for ElevenLabs, following a $100m tender offer in September 2025.
- The Next Web reporter Cristian Dina reported that chief executive Mati Staniszewski wants ElevenLabs to be ready for a possible stock-market listing within two to two-and-a-half years.
ElevenLabs has doubled its valuation to $22bn after completing a $300m employee tender offer, putting the London-based voice AI company among the world’s most highly valued private artificial intelligence businesses. The transaction, led by Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price, gives employees and existing shareholders an opportunity to sell part of their holdings while establishing a valuation twice the $11bn figure set by the company’s February Series D funding round.
What has happened to the ElevenLabs valuation?
As reported by Amy Ingham of Business Matters, ElevenLabs has doubled its valuation to $22bn after closing a $300m employee share sale. Business Matters reported that the valuation is approximately £16bn and puts the British voice AI company among the world’s most valuable AI labs.
The transaction was announced by ElevenLabs on 30 September 2026. The company’s own announcement said the $300m employee tender offer valued the business at $22bn, twice the valuation attached to its Series D round in February.
The latest figure represents a substantial increase from the company’s earlier valuations. ElevenLabs said its first funding round in 2022 valued the company at $9m. Business Matters reported that the latest valuation is therefore more than 2,000 times the company’s initial valuation.
The February Series D round raised $500m and placed ElevenLabs at an $11bn valuation. Reuters reporter Pragyan Kalita, writing for Reuters on 30 September, confirmed that the latest tender offer valued the company at twice the level reached in that February financing.
How does the $300m employee tender offer work?
The transaction differs from a conventional fundraising round.
Reuters explained that a tender offer enables employees and existing shareholders to sell shares to investors, providing liquidity without necessarily putting new capital into the company’s balance sheet. Business Matters similarly reported that employees and existing shareholders were able to sell stock rather than ElevenLabs raising fresh cash through a conventional funding round.
TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin reported that the latest $300m transaction allows employees to cash out a portion of their vested equity at the new $22bn valuation. Temkin also noted that this is the second employee secondary transaction authorised by the company.
The previous employee tender took place in September 2025 and involved $100m of shares at a $6.6bn valuation, according to TechCrunch. The latest transaction therefore establishes another significantly higher valuation while continuing the mechanism of allowing employees to obtain liquidity from vested shares.
The company itself said regular liquidity opportunities are intended to allow its employees to participate in the value they are helping create.
Who led the ElevenLabs share sale?
The $300m tender offer was led by Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price.
Reuters reported that existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed, participated, while EQT and Goldman Sachs were among the new investors.
ElevenLabs provided a broader list in its corporate announcement. It said BDT & MSD, EQT, GIC, Goldman Sachs, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Sapphire Ventures invested in the company for the first time.
The company also listed existing investors including Alkeon, Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw, DISRUPTIVE, Evantic, ICONIQ and Lightspeed as participants in the tender.
Business Matters additionally noted that earlier backers included Sequoia Capital and actor Matthew McConaughey.
Why is ElevenLabs attracting more enterprise demand?
A major part of the company’s expansion has been its move beyond conventional text-to-speech technology into conversational AI agents.
ElevenLabs said enterprise customers now account for 55 per cent of its revenue. Its ElevenAgents platform is designed to allow organisations to deploy conversational AI systems that can listen, understand, respond and take action.
According to ElevenLabs, the platform now handles more than 15 million conversations per week, three times the number recorded in February. The company also said annual recurring revenue from ElevenAgents has increased more than threefold over the same period.
City A.M. reporter Saskia Koopman reported that the agents are being used for tasks including refunds, insurance renewals, telephone-plan upgrades and healthcare bookings.
Business Matters reported a similar range of uses and named customers including Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, Admiral and the governments of Ukraine and Greece. City A.M. additionally identified SevenRooms, owned by DoorDash, among the customers using the technology.
ElevenLabs’ own announcement also named Customers Bank and Cadence, alongside Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, SevenRooms, Admiral, Ukraine and Greece.
The company said its technology is being used in daily operations at five of the world’s ten largest technology companies, five of the ten largest insurers and four of the ten largest telecommunications groups.
How many conversations do ElevenLabs’ AI agents handle?
The company’s latest figures point to a rapid increase in the use of its voice agents.
Reuters reported that ElevenLabs’ agents now handle more than 15 million conversations each week, three times the level reported in February. Reuters said those interactions include tasks such as processing refunds, renewing insurance policies and booking appointments.
ElevenLabs provided additional detail, saying its agents can support sales, customer service and business operations. The company said the number of organisations deploying multichannel support through ElevenAgents has doubled since February.
The company also reported that its own analysis of customers found that voice agents resolved issues an average of 31 per cent faster than chat agents. That figure is an analysis conducted by ElevenLabs rather than an independently verified industry benchmark, so it should be understood in that context.
What did Mati Staniszewski say about the company’s growth?
ElevenLabs co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski said the company was seeing increasing adoption of expressive voice agents among enterprises and governments.
As reported by Amy Ingham of Business Matters, Staniszewski said the company’s objective was for AI to interact with people in a way similar to human interaction and argued that this could support broader adoption of AI across the economy.
Staniszewski also linked the employee tender to the company’s intention to allow staff to participate in the value being created through the business.
City A.M.’s Saskia Koopman reported that employee liquidity was one of the reasons given by ElevenLabs for the latest tender.
Reuters reported that Staniszewski said rapid adoption was already taking place as enterprises and governments deployed expressive voice agents to serve consumers and citizens.
What did T. Rowe Price say about ElevenLabs?
Emma Norchet of T. Rowe Price also commented on the company’s development.
In ElevenLabs’ announcement, Norchet said the combination of research, product development and deployment had become an important structural advantage as the conversational-agent business expanded. She said the company’s ability to improve across different layers of its technology stack was supporting rapid execution and value for enterprise customers.
The comment is significant because T. Rowe Price was one of the two institutions leading the latest tender offer alongside Wellington Management.
What technology does ElevenLabs provide?
ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski. Business Matters reported that Staniszewski previously worked at Palantir, while Dabkowski was formerly a machine-learning engineer at Google.
The company initially became known for technology that converts text into highly realistic speech. Its product portfolio has since expanded into voice agents, speech-to-text, voice cloning, sound effects, music generation,n and other AI audio applications.
The company has also released Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo, two new text-to-speech models. ElevenLabs described the models as its fastest and most expressive models to date.
Reuters reported that the company’s models can speak, listen, en and translate in more than 90 languages, representing languages used by more than 5.5 billion people, according to ElevenLabs.
How large is ElevenLabs’ workforce?
ElevenLabs now employs more than 800 people.
City A.M. reported that the company operates across 20 countries, while London remains its largest base.
The company’s own announcement said its workforce had passed 800 employees and reiterated its commitment to providing staff with regular opportunities for liquidity.
The international footprint reflects the company’s expansion from a voice-generation specialist into a broader AI interaction platform serving businesses and public-sector organisations.
What does the valuation mean for the UK AI sector?
The $22bn valuation has also placed attention on the wider UK technology market.
City A.M.’s Saskia Koopman reported that the latest valuation provides another indication of the rising value of Britain’s private AI companies. According to Hurun UK Unicorn Index research cited by City A.M., the UK’s nine AI unicorns were valued at more than £40bn collectively in July, when ElevenLabs was valued at approximately £8.5bn.
City A.M. also reported that the wider Hurun index counted 70 UK companies valued above $1bn, with a combined value of £228bn. The publication noted that only two UK unicorns had floated during the year when the July research was published, compared with 35 in the United States.
The figures form part of an ongoing discussion about whether British technology companies can grow into large independent businesses while retaining ownership, investment and eventual listings within the UK.
Business Matters also referred to a recent British Business Bank report, which found that UK venture capital funds had matched US returns over two decades, recording a pooled multiple of 1.78 times for funds from the 2002–2021 vintages.
How does ElevenLabs compare with other European AI companies?
The new valuation puts ElevenLabs close to other highly valued European AI companies.
Business Matters reported that ElevenLabs is now on a similar valuation level to France’s Mistral, which reached a $24bn valuation in September following a €3bn funding round led by Samsung.
The comparison illustrates the scale of capital flowing into Europe’s private AI sector, although the businesses have different technologies, funding histories and operating models.
The latest ElevenLabs valuation also represents a substantial increase from its $9m valuation at its first funding round in 2022.
Is ElevenLabs preparing for a stock-market listing?
The possibility of a future public listing has also emerged alongside the new valuation.
The Next Web reporter Cristian Dina reported that chief executive Mati Staniszewski wants ElevenLabs to be ready for a possible stock-market listing within the next two to two-and-a-half years. Dina also reported that the latest tender gives employees liquidity while the company continues to grow privately.
The Next Web reported that ElevenLabs had also appointed a finance chief who previously worked on taking Adyen public.
That does not mean an IPO has been announced or scheduled. Rather, the reported timeline indicates that management is considering public-market readiness as the company expands.
What does the latest deal say about employee liquidity in AI companies?
TechCrunch’s Marina Temkin placed the transaction within a broader trend among rapidly growing AI start-ups that use secondary employee share sales to provide liquidity.
In a secondary transaction, shares are sold by existing holders rather than being newly issued by the company. The structure can therefore give employees a way to realise part of the value of vested equity while allowing private investors to establish a new valuation.
For ElevenLabs, the latest transaction follows its $100m employee tender in September 2025 at a $6.6bn valuation. The new $22bn valuation therefore represents another major repricing within roughly a year.
The transaction comes as ElevenLabs continues expanding its AI products, enterprise customer base and international workforce.
What is next for ElevenLabs?
The immediate focus for ElevenLabs is its continued expansion of conversational AI alongside its established text-to-speech technology.
The company says its enterprise business now accounts for 55 per cent of revenue, while ElevenAgents is handling more than 15 million weekly conversations. Its latest models, Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo, are part of a broader strategy to develop AI systems capable of more natural interaction.
The company is also continuing to expand its workforce and international operations. With more than 800 employees and operations across 20 countries, ElevenLabs is no longer operating solely as a specialist text-to-speech start-up.
For businesses following developments in voice AI, conversational agents and enterprise automation, the expansion also highlights the growing relevance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in corporate operations. Oxford Training Centre’s Artificial Intelligence (AI)) courses cover professional learning around technologies and applications that are increasingly becoming part of business technology strategies.
The $22bn valuation, however, remains a private-market valuation established through the latest tender transaction. It should therefore be distinguished from a public-market valuation, where a listed company’s value is continuously determined through trading.