An AI business founded by a 29-year old London tech entrepreneur is now worth more than $1 billion dollars after a fresh funding round in signs the capital is cementing its status as Europe’s foremost artificial intelligence hub.
ElevenLabs, which uses AI to generate voices use for video dubbing, has hit the unicorn milestone less than two years after its launch following a $80 million Series B funding round led by US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
The firm plans to use the funding to hire dozens more staff and bring more products to market. The firm’s value has shot up from its series A funding round just a few months ago, when it was worth 100 million.
Mati Staniszewski, a former Palantir employee who founded the firm at the age of 27, told the Standard: “It’s a huge boost in terms of the trust that investors have placed in us. It’s definitely a milestone but we realise the next few years are critical to stay at the forefront of technology.
“We need more engineers and we need people who will sell the technology to clients. Research is an important part of what we do and costs of the developing the models will go into the tens of millions of dollars to train the models and compete in the market.”
Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman joined the funding round, alongside Daniel Gross, an entrepreneur who led AI development at Apple, and tech venture capital firm Sequoia.
The funding is the latest sign of London's emergence as a regional AI hub, after Google last week unveiled plans for a $1 billion datacentre to support its AI capability; ChatGPT maker OpenAI last year opened its first office outside the US in the capital, and US giant C3.AI moved its Europe headquarters to London. Top British AI entrepreneurs have built stakes in businesses worth billions of dollars in recent years, including the founders of London-based Deepmind, which is now owned by Google.
"There are more and more founders that I see building AI, as well as more people in traditional companies keen to join startups," Stanisczewski said.
"I think there's a realisation in London that this technology can truly change a lot of our work the same way the internet changed the way we communicate. It's exciting -- for us as a company having our headquarters in London, it's so nice to see more people building in this space."
