ElevenLabs CEO on $22B Valuation, AI Customer Service Voices and the Future of Disclosure
TL;DR
- ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski addressed the company's reported $22B valuation, calling it a reflection of surging enterprise demand for AI voice agents rather than hype.
- The company now powers millions of AI customer service calls daily, with Staniszewski arguing that speed, cost, and 24/7 availability are driving mass adoption.
- Staniszewski says businesses should disclose when callers are speaking to AI, predicting consumer expectations will soon flip to assume AI voices as the default.
A $22 Billion Voice Bet
In a 20-minute conversation this week, ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski struck a characteristically calm tone about the number dominating headlines around his company: $22 billion.
That reported valuation, tied to ElevenLabs' latest funding talks, would make the three-year-old London-founded startup one of the most valuable AI companies in the world outside of the foundation model giants. Staniszewski declined to confirm the specifics of the round, but said the figure reflects a fundamental shift in where AI is creating real revenue.
Investors, he suggested, are no longer betting on voice as a novelty feature. They are betting on voice as infrastructure. While much of the AI boom has focused on chatbots and copilots, ElevenLabs has quietly become the default voice layer for thousands of businesses, from banks and airlines to telehealth providers and delivery platforms.
The company, founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, first broke out with hyper-realistic text-to-speech and voice cloning. Today its fastest-growing product is its Conversational AI platform for building autonomous voice agents that can handle inbound and outbound calls end-to-end.
From Cloning to Call Centers
Staniszewski said customer service emerged almost by accident as ElevenLabs' killer use case. Early creators used the tools for audiobooks and dubbing, but enterprises quickly realized the same latency and realism breakthroughs could solve a chronic pain point: the call center.
Traditional interactive voice response systems frustrated customers. Human-only support was expensive and hard to scale. ElevenLabs' agents, capable of interrupting, pausing, switching languages mid-call, and pulling live data from CRMs, offered a third path.
The CEO claimed the company now handles millions of minutes of customer conversations per day, with clients reporting double-digit improvements in resolution times and major drops in wait times. In sectors with high call volume and labor shortages, like healthcare scheduling and logistics, he said AI agents are not just augmenting human teams, they are handling the majority of Tier-1 inquiries.
That dominance, he argued, comes down to economics and quality. An AI agent can answer instantly at 2 a.m., speak 32 languages natively, and never put someone on hold. For global businesses, that is hard to ignore.
Why Businesses Should Say It's AI
Despite pushing for wider deployment, Staniszewski took a clear stance on transparency: businesses should tell callers when they are speaking to a machine.
He said disclosure builds long-term trust, even if short-term metrics might tempt companies to pass AI off as human. As voices get indistinguishable from people, he warned, failing to disclose risks backlash and regulatory trouble, particularly in sensitive areas like banking, healthcare, and debt collection.
ElevenLabs already offers built-in disclosure prompts and tools to detect misuse, and Staniszewski said the company encourages clients to open calls with a brief notice that the agent is AI-powered. Far from hurting adoption, he claims most customers don't hang up — they just adjust how they speak, often becoming more direct.
The position aligns with emerging laws in California, the EU, and elsewhere requiring AI identification in consumer-facing communications. Staniszewski said he welcomes that regulation, arguing clear rules will accelerate enterprise adoption by removing legal uncertainty.
When AI Voices Become the Default
Perhaps his boldest prediction was about consumer psychology. Right now, callers are often surprised — sometimes annoyed — to realize they are talking to AI. Within a couple of years, Staniszewski believes that expectation will flip completely.
Just as people now assume they will get an instant reply from chat support or same-day delivery tracking, they will soon assume a phone call will be answered instantly, with perfect recall of their account history. Only AI can deliver that, he said.
In that world, the telltale signs of a human agent — background noise, hold music, limited hours — could become the exception rather than the norm. Consumers won't ask Is this AI? They'll ask Why do I have to wait for a human?
Staniszewski acknowledged challenges remain, especially around handling emotionally charged calls, complex edge cases, and ensuring low-latency performance at global scale. He said ElevenLabs is investing heavily in more expressive, empathetic models and tighter integration with enterprise software to handle multi-step tasks like rebooking flights or processing insurance claims without human handoff.
But he was unequivocal about the direction of travel. Voice, once considered too hard for AI to get right, is now the interface businesses want most. And if the $22 billion figure holds, investors are betting he is right.
Get All The Latest Updates Delivered Straight To Your Inbox For Free!