ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is an AI audio company known for highly realistic text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing, and increasingly voice-agent infrastructure. Its models set a quality bar for synthetic speech and are widely used across media, gaming, accessibility, and customer-facing voice applications, making it the most prominent specialist in the AI audio layer.

Founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs focused on the audio modality at a time when most attention was on text and images. Its speech synthesis and voice-cloning quality quickly became a reference point, and it expanded into multilingual dubbing, sound effects, and speech-to-text.

The company has moved beyond raw generation toward a platform for voice agents and conversational audio, offering APIs and tooling for developers building spoken interfaces. Its technology is used in publishing, entertainment, accessibility tools, and enterprise voice applications.

Backed by leading venture investors at a multi-billion-dollar valuation, ElevenLabs competes with audio offerings from the large labs and other speech specialists, while also navigating the ethical and safety questions that voice cloning raises. It is the clearest example of a category-defining company in a single AI modality.