ElevenLabs, the viral AI-powered platform for creating artificial voices, has raised a brand new spherical of money.
In the present day, the startup introduced the closure of a $19 million Sequence A spherical co-led by entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross alongside Andreessen Horowitz. Different members included heavyweights Creator Ventures, SV Angel, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, Deepmind and Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly.
A supply conversant in the matter tells TechCrunch that the tranche values ElevenLabs at $99 million post-money — a good determine, particularly contemplating that the startup launched simply over a yr in the past.
“This funding can be used to proceed constructing ElevenLab’s cutting-edge analysis hub for voice AI and to launch a spread of further merchandise to assist particular market verticals resembling publishing, gaming, leisure and conversational purposes,” co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski advised TechCrunch through e mail.
ElevenLabs, which has made headlines over the previous few months for causes each good and abhorrent, was based by Staniszewski, who beforehand labored at Palantir, and his childhood buddy Piotr Dabkowski, an ex-Google worker. Impressed by the mediocre dubbing of American motion pictures they watched rising up in Poland, their native nation, the pair set about designing a platform that might do higher — leveraging AI, in fact.
ElevenLabs can flip textual content into speech utilizing artificial voices, cloned voices or completely novel “synthetic” voices that mimic the sounds of individuals of varied genders, ages and ethnicities. The corporate’s AI text-to-speech fashions are language-agnostic, permitting company prospects to fine-tune them and construct their very own, proprietary speech fashions on prime.
Coinciding with the Sequence A increase, 15-employee ElevenLabs is launching Initiatives, a workflow for enhancing and creating long-form spoken content material. With Initiatives, customers can generate dialogue segments and even audiobooks with out having to depart the platform.
“For business-to-business companions, our know-how can be utilized in areas resembling scalable and multilingual audiobook creation, voicing characters in video video games, voicing digital articles, supporting the visually impaired to entry on-line written content material and powering AI radio,” Staniszewski stated.
ElevenLabs, which launched in beta in late January, picked up steam quite rapidly — owing to the extraordinarily top quality of its generated voices, speedy era instances and beneficiant free tier. However as alluded to earlier, the publicity hasn’t all the time been optimistic — significantly as soon as unhealthy actors started to use the platform for their very own ends.
ElevenLabs gives instruments to clone — or generate from scratch — realistic-sounding voices, leveraging AI.
4chan, the notorious message board recognized for its conspiratorial content material, used ElevenLabs’ instrument to share hateful messages mimicking celebrities just like the actor Emma Watson. Elsewhere, The.Verge’s James Vincent was in a position to faucet ElevenLabs to clone targets’ voices in a matter of seconds — generating audio samples containing the whole lot from threats of violence to expressions of racism and transphobia.
In response, ElevenLabs stated that it could introduce a set of latest safeguards, like limiting voice cloning to paid accounts, banning customers who repeatedly violate its phrases of service and offering a brand new AI detection instrument.
The detection instrument launches immediately. Known as AI Speech Classifier and out there as an API to “chosen” companions, it’s designed to detect whether or not an uploaded audio pattern comprises AI-generated content material from ElevenLabs.
“Guaranteeing Generative AI platforms will be embraced safely is a key problem for the entire AI-generated sector, together with textual content, picture and voice platforms,” Staniszewski stated. “We should be certain that individuals are educated concerning the nature of the generative media panorama and know that such content material is on the market — we’re dedicated to constructing instruments to assist individuals detect AI-generated content material, within the curiosity of transparency.”
A voluntary detection instrument — assuming it even works as marketed — gained’t essentially deter unhealthy habits. However there’s one other elephant within the room that ElevenLabs hasn’t addressed: the existential menace its tech poses to voice actors.
Motherboard writes about how voice actors are more and more being requested to signal rights to their voices away in order that purchasers can use AI to generate artificial variations that might ultimately substitute them — generally with out further compensation. Inside emails seen by The New York Instances, meanwile, point out that Activision Blizzard, one of many largest sport publishers on the planet, is engaged on instruments for AI-assisted “voice cloning.”
It could seem that ElevenLabs sees this because the pure development of issues, touting its work with publishers like Storytel and media platforms like TheSoul Publishing and MNTN for audiobooks, video video games and radio content material. (Storytel and TheSoul Publishing are strategic buyers.) The corporate claims that it has over 1,000,000 registered customers throughout the inventive, leisure and publishing areas who’ve created ten years’ price of audio content material.
ElevenLabs plans to ultimately prolong its AI fashions to voice dubbing, following within the footsteps of startups like Papercup and Deepdub and constructing what it calls “a basis to have the ability to switch feelings and intonation from one language to a different.”
“This may allow any video to be dubbed into any language in an interesting, efficient, and scalable method, all whereas sustaining the unique speaker’s voice,” ElevenLabs writes in a press launch. “[We are] already conducting quite a few assessments with business companions to allow AI dubbing at scale.”
With $21 million within the financial institution ($2 million of which got here from a pre-seed spherical in January), ElevenLabs — penalties be damned — is laser-focused on beating again its rivals within the burgeoning generative voice area. They embody incumbents like Amazon, Google and Microsoft in addition to startups like Murf, Tavus, Resemble AI, Respeecher, Play.ht and Lovo.