Behind The Curtain: Why We Selected Polish AI Audio Startup ElevenLabs

Our local office in Warsaw was very excited about ElevenLabs. “This is an example of founders who have vision, courage, and determination,” the team led by Managing Director Bartosz Lipnicki noted during the initial review process. “They show that you can create an idea in Poland and go outside of Poland to develop and scale it.”

Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski are the co-founders of ElevenLabs. They are two high school friends who grew up together in Poland and then moved to the UK to pursue degrees from Imperial College and Oxford, respectively. Studying for his graduate degree in Cambridge, Piotr completed his thesis on AI-based image detection and published it at NeurIPS, a top machine-learning conference, long before most people had heard of large language models (LLMs) or OpenAI, the company that popularized AI with the launch of ChatGPT.

Over years of studying, working, and living together, the pair became enamored by the raw potential of AI audio technology. They were inspired to be better than the lektors they grew up watching — the lone male actor in Poland who dubbed the voices of all the cast (man, woman and child) of foreign films in a bored monotone over the original language, so both voices can be heard.

It sounds something like this:

ElevenLabs began as a research company in 2022 that aimed to build better text-to-speech (TTS) models from scratch from first principles before adapting these models for any customer-facing tech product. Mati and Piotr thought the voice offerings from Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa were so obviously robotic.

So what is it that makes a voice human?

Most people want to remove the “umms” and other pauses from their speeches and conversations. But the ElevenLabs team knew they were on the right track when their model was capable of adding those sounds in naturally, including laughter. “We started seeing some of those human elements being replicated,” Mati told The Atlantic.

After building its first AI voice models, ElevenLabs launched Speech Synthesis in 2023, a simple web-based TTS platform targeting content creators wanting narrated social media videos and publishers who wanted, for example, to turn written content into audiobooks.

Our team was particularly impressed by the “cutting-edge technology” behind ElevenLabs’s offerings and their focus on the business customer. The company has won widespread praise among early adopters as one of the most realistic, authentic-sounding models on the market, filling up Reddit threads and YouTube videos and also as voted on by the open-source AI community Hugging Face. The technology is being used by newspapers to read articles to you, film studios to tap into foreign markets, and has even been used by U.S. Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton to deliver speeches after losing her voice to PSP.

After establishing a beachhead with consumers, ElevenLabs has zeroed in on three enterprise market segments with the shared interest of replacing time and effort-intensive voiceovers: media (newspapers, magazines), entertainment (film and TV), and publishing. We estimate these industries collectively spent an estimated $6B a year producing high-quality voiceovers for content, a huge opportunity for this two-year-old upstart.

Their competitors are also ceding a lot of this territory, preferring to make generalist tools.

Amazon and Google’s tools are typically barebones and require high-friction access; Amazon Polly and Google WaveNet, the two most obvious comparables, require users to sign up for paid AWS / Google Cloud accounts, for example. OpenAI – the unofficial heavyweight champion of consumer AI – has adopted a business strategy of releasing APIs for developers to build on. We believe OpenAI itself is unlikely to release a first-party tool catering to the needs of the media, entertainment, and publishing spaces.

In their initial interviews in August 2023, the co-CEOs were vetted by a local selection panel led by Endeavor Poland and an international panel with active Endeavor mentors from around the world, from a CEO in Uruguay to a 3D artist based in Florida, USA.

We define companies that have the potential to join Endeavor into four different kinds. ElevenLabs is a ROCKET SHIP.

Rocket ships are strategic thinkers who are focused on driving efficiency and making something cheaper, faster, and better. They are often skilled managers/MBAs who start companies that apply or adapt a proven model to fill a market gap. Rocket ships tend to have a clear revenue model and formula for growth. They are able to execute effectively and can achieve regional or global scale and rapid revenue acceleration.

When we’re considering potential rocket ship companies, we ask them—and our own internal experts—questions like:

1. Can this company add millions in incremental revenue over the next few years?

2. Is there a well-defined business model with a clear formula for growth?

3. Does the entrepreneur/leadership team have the managerial expertise to execute its growth strategy?

4. Can this company best the competition in cost, execution, and efficiency to gain and maintain market share?

A second opinion was sought from Matias Rozenfarb, the Argentine founder of AI research company Keepcon, which launched way back in 2008. This is an example of The Endeavor Multiplier Effect™, where the work we do with entrepreneurs is paid forward by inspiring, mentoring, and investing in the next generation of founders.

“During the meeting, he took advantage of the conversation as a mentoring opportunity asking me questions about challenges he is going to face,” Matias told the panel. “He showed he was humble enough by recognizing new challenges and looking for help. At the same time, he just raised a huge investment and he is aware of the momentum of companies like his.”

Since launch, creators and businesses on the platform have collectively generated over 100 years of audio and their technology is already being used by employees at 62% of Fortune 500 companies. In January, ElevenLabs raised another $80M of Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, making them a unicorn.

In February 2024, six months after their initial interviews, South African investor and Endeavor mentor Melvyn Lubega interviewed them again. “At a time when there are many ‘me too’ founders in AI, the ElevenLabs team comes across as those that truly want to make a difference and are doing so to move the adoption of AI for meaningful purposes. Endeavor locally and globally will be better for their inclusion in the community.”

Mati and Piotr became Endeavor Entrepreneurs in April 2024.