ElevenLabs’ CEO on margins, IPO timing, and telling customers they’re talking to a bot
- ID
- 28158
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 25 Sep 2026, 12:35 AM
- Fetched
- 25 Sep 2026, 3:17 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/24/twenty-minutes-with-the-ceo-of-elevenlabs-now-reportedly-valued-at-22-billion/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 25 Sep 2026, 3:19 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_foundersai_ml_learnersai_agent_users
What happened
TechCrunch interviewed ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski at the Nrth conference in Toronto; the company is reportedly valued at $22 billion by its backers and says it is pacing at $600 million in annual recurring revenue, four years after founding. Klarna runs first-line phone support for 35 million U.S. customers on ElevenLabs, alongside Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Adobe and a growing list of governments. Staniszewski said he could not discuss gross margins in detail but does not mind them being squeezed further if it buys market share, and said businesses should tell customers when they are talking to an AI.
Why it matters
Two concrete signals for anyone building voice into a product: the CEO explicitly accepts margin compression to win share, which points to price pressure rather than price stability on voice APIs, and he endorses telling customers they are talking to a bot. Also note that Decagon trained its voice product on ElevenLabs and now competes with it, so if your stack depends on one voice vendor, that vendor is both your supplier and a potential future competitor. The article gives no detail on the commoditization timeline he predicted last year beyond saying the quality delta at model level is still significant.
Discussion angle
If voice model quality keeps converging and the incumbent CEO is willing to trade margin for share, what is actually defensible in a voice agent product — the model, the workflow integration, or the data you own? Worth arguing with the Decagon example in hand.