A London-based AI startup that launched earlier this year has already reached a $100 million valuation in fresh signs investors are pouring in cash to snap up shares in the nascent technology.
ElevenLabs, which uses artificial intelligence to generate audio for dubbing videos into different languages, has no office and up until recently had fewer than ten employees. But it has already achieved a $19 million funding round backed by the likes of VC giant Andreessen Horowitz and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, valuing it at around $99 million.
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder of ElevenLabs, told the Standard: “When we were pitching with investors in 2022, most of them were still focusing on crypto and the metaverse but there was no clear interest in AI – the whole market thought this was not the best time.
“But a lot of people have become more aware of AI technology and some of the benefits it can offer so people were more keen to innovate and experiment and it was significantly easier for us to speak with investors.
“We were very lucky with timing in terms of the general field maturing.”
It comes after Paris-based AI firm Mistral raised over 100 million euros just weeks after it was set up, valuing it at just shy of a quarter of a billion euros.
Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: “My guess is AI now is where say the internet was 25 years ago – new, fascinating, potentially terrifying and lots of firms looking to get a piece of the action, either to defend their existing business model or to demolish and disrupt someone else’s. There will be big winners and there will be big losers.
“No-one, but no-one, knows which will be which, so the policy that many adapt will be to spread their capital around and see if they can find one or two of the potential gems.”
Rishi Sunak has placed artificial intelligence front and centre of his plans to grow the UK economy, setting up an ‘AI taskforce’ and earlier this month announcing the UK would be host to the first global AI summit.
At a speech to London Tech Week last week, he said he wanted to make the UK “not just the intellectual home but the geographical home of global AI.”
“We are going to seize the extraordinary potential of AI to improve people’s lives,” he said.
Speaking at the Fintech Week London conference, City minister Andrew Griffith said: “We want to encourage investment in higher risk, early-stage companies, those that face the biggest challenges in accessing funding.
“The explosion of interest in AI over the past six months has propelled it into every boardroom and to the centre of government.
“The UK government’s vision is for the UK to be one of the world’s leading nations in the development and commercial application of AI.”
ElevenLabs hopes to upgrade the decades-old film dubbing industry by using text-to-speech and voice cloning software to produce compelling, rich and lifelike voices.
“Being from Poland, one of the things you experience at the cinema is you rely on a single voice narrator to deliver all the lines in the movie,” Staniszewski said.
“We realise that if you stretch in the future, all the content out there will be delivered in a significantly different way.”
The firm, which recently expanded to a team of 15, hopes to use the funding to grow to a staff of 30 by the end of the year.
