The Future of Voice AI: Agents, Dubbing, and Real-Time Translation with ElevenLabs Co-Founder Mati Staniszewski

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Mati Staniszewski, the co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, which was founded to change the way we interact with each other and with computers with voice. Over three short years, they've skyrocketed to more than 300 million in runway. Mati and I talked about the future of voice, education, customer experience, and the other applications of this voice, as well as how to build a multi-segment from self-serve to enterprise and combined research and product company. Welcome, Mati.

**Mati Staniszewski** (0:37)
Sarah, thanks for having me.

**Sarah Guo** (0:38)
And thank you for doing this at 7 in the morning.

**Mati Staniszewski** (0:40)
Our pleasure. Thank you for doing that at 7 in the morning. It's great we got to finally do this together.

**Sarah Guo** (0:46)
I think a lot of our listeners will have used or played with Eleven at some point, but for everybody else, can you just reintroduce the company?

**Mati Staniszewski** (0:52)
Definitely. At ElevenLabs, we are solving how humans and technology interact, how you can create seamlessly with that technology. And what this means in practice is we build foundational audio models, so models in a space to help you create speech that sounds human, understand speech in a much better way, or orchestrate all those components to make it interactive, and then build products on top of that foundational models. And we have our creative product, which is a platform for helping you with narrations, for audiobooks, for voiceovers, for ads or movies, or dabs of those movies to other languages. And our agent's platform product, which is effectively an offering to help you elevate customer experience, build an agent for personal AI, education, new ways of immersive media. But all is kind of underlined with that mission of solving how we can interact with technology on our terms in a better way.

**Sarah Guo** (1:45)
You started the company in 2022?

**Mati Staniszewski** (1:47)
That's right.

**Sarah Guo** (1:48)
And you've had amazing like rocket ship growth since then. I'm sure it's felt up and down in different ways. I want to ask you about that. Can you give a sense of what the scale of the company is today?

**Mati Staniszewski** (1:57)
So we've grown to 350 people globally. We started from Europe. We started as a remote company and are still remote first, but have hubs around the world with London being the biggest, New York being second biggest, Warsaw, San Francisco, and now Tokyo, and one in Brazil. We are at 300 million in ARR, which is roughly 50-50 between self-serve. So a lot of subscription and creators using our creative platform, and then approaching 50 percent on the enterprise side using our agents' platform work, and that's on the sales led, classic sales led side. We serve more than 5 million monthly actives on that creative side of the work. Then on the enterprise side, we have few thousand customers from Fortune 500 to some of the fastest AI growing startups.

**Sarah Guo** (2:46)
I think this is such a, you're an amazing founder, but I also think it's such an interesting company because it is very unintuitive to, I think, many people and investors in particular. I don't know if you faced this at the beginning, but I remember there in 2022, there's a class of companies that allow creation in some way. When we look at your first business beyond the research itself, and I would put Eleven and Mid Journey and Suno and Haitian in this category, and I think there's this overall sense of like, who really wants to do this? What was your initial read of how many people want to make voices, or what made you believe that was going to be much broader than? If I look at dubbing, for example, it's not a huge market.

**Mati Staniszewski** (3:32)
I think first piece was, which is, as you mentioned, there's like a very, it's very tricky to do both the product and the research. I'm in a lucky position that my co-founder and I know for 15 years. I think he's the smartest person I know, and has been able to create a lot of that research work, to be able to create that foundation, to then elevate that experience. But both of us are from Poland originally, and the original belief came from Poland. It's a very peculiar thing. But if you watch a movie in Polish language, a foreign movie in Polish language, all the voices, whether it's a male voice or a female voice, are narrated with one single character. So you have like a flat delivery for everything in a movie.

**Sarah Guo** (4:09)