The AI Voice Startup That Made Speech Borderless 🔊🤖
How ElevenLabs turned a $2M pre-seed idea into a $6.6B voice empire, and redefined what “human” sounds like in AI 🗣️
👋 Hey, Linas here! Welcome to a special issue of my daily newsletter. Each day, I focus on 3 stories that are making a difference in the financial technology space. Coupled with things worth watching & most important money movements, it’s the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Tech. If you’re reading this for the first time, it’s a brilliant opportunity to join a community of 355k+ FinTech leaders:
When Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski founded ElevenLabs, they weren’t chasing another text-to-speech gimmick.
They were trying to make language itself obsolete as a barrier.
Two ex-Googlers and Palantir engineers asked a bold question:
What if every voice on Earth could be understood in any language - instantly, emotionally, perfectly?
Three years later, that idea became a business growing faster than words themselves:
→ $281M raised from a16z, Sequoia & NVIDIA
→ $200M ARR
→ $6.6B valuation
→ Used by Hollywood, gamers, and the world’s top creators
This is the breakdown of the pitch deck that started it all - the one that launched ElevenLabs from a $2M idea to Europe’s most respected voice AI company.
Inside, you will also get full access to Top AI Agent Startups of 2025 & their pitch decks and a list of the top 100 artificial intelligence startups of 2024 (& their pitch decks), and the storytelling patterns that make frontier startups irresistible.
Let’s dive in & break it down: