ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is an AI voice technology company founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski, former Google and Palantir engineers. The company has quickly become the industry leader in AI voice synthesis, offering the most natural-sounding text-to-speech and voice cloning technology available.

ElevenLabs' platform can generate human-quality speech in 32 languages, clone voices from just a few minutes of audio, and create entirely new synthetic voices. The technology is used for audiobook production, video dubbing, podcast creation, accessibility tools, and interactive AI applications. ElevenLabs' API serves thousands of developers building voice-enabled AI products.

The company has raised over $100 million and launched a suite of products including Voice Library (a marketplace of AI voices), Projects (long-form content creation), and Dubbing (automatic video translation with voice matching). ElevenLabs competes with OpenAI's TTS, Amazon Polly, and Google Cloud TTS, but is widely regarded as producing the most expressive, natural-sounding AI speech available.

ElevenLabs has become the underlying voice technology for a growing list of consumer-distribution surfaces. The most prominent integration is Spotify for Authors, where ElevenLabs powers AI audiobook narration for self-publishing authors — Spotify pitches the integration as a "more expressive and human-like" upgrade to its earlier Google Play Books partnership. The arrangement is non-exclusive: authors generate audiobooks inside Spotify's tooling but are free to distribute the resulting files on any platform. The deal puts ElevenLabs voices directly inside the largest audio platform's self-publishing funnel and validates the broader pattern of ElevenLabs as the de-facto voice layer for major AI audio products, alongside its existing roles in Spotify's Studio AI agent, ChatGPT voice, and a long tail of indie podcast, game, and accessibility deployments.

On September 10, 2026 ElevenLabs signed a multiyear licensing agreement with Universal Music Group, the largest of the three major labels, to build a platform on which listeners can draw from UMG's catalog to create remixes, mashups and new takes on tracks. Participation is opt-in for artists, and the platform will sit separately from ElevenLabs' existing music generator and Music API. Chief executive Mati Staniszewski framed the deal around ensuring artists and songwriters are fairly compensated; neither company published financial terms, artist opt-in rates or a launch date. The agreement matters less as technology than as rights: generative music has been constrained by catalog access rather than model quality, and this places ElevenLabs on the licensed side of a line UMG has spent two years litigating against other vendors.