The Story Behind ElevenLabs | Interview with CEO Mati Staniszewski

ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski on hitting $330M ARR, removing all titles, and racing to pass the ‘vocal Turing test’

• ElevenLabs crossed $330M ARR in 2025, doubling every 6 months, with 300+ employees across 11 cities.
• Started as a weekend project in 2021 — Mati was at Palantir, Piotr at Google; launched to a waitlist of thousands that became hundreds of thousands overnight.
• Origin insight: Polish dubbing collapses all voices into one monotone narrator, stripping all emotion — that’s the problem they set out to fix.
• Removed all job titles company-wide; explicitly filters out ego-driven candidates, no VP track.
• Only ~50–100 top-tier voice researchers exist globally — remote-first structure was the only way to hire them all.
• Goal: be the first to pass a ‘vocal Turing test’ — AI voice indistinguishable from human in live back-and-forth conversation.
• Training on raw audio (not text tokens) unlocks a new modality of intelligence — model smart in audio generalizes to any raw-data domain.
• Roadmap: collapse specialized models (voice, sound effects, music) into one unified audio model that can cross-generate between modalities.
• Voice is the only AI modality that triggers genuine emotion — ASMR, cinematic tone, intimacy — text cannot replicate this.

Guests: Mati Staniszewski (ElevenLabs CEO), Piotr Dąbkowski (ElevenLabs co-founder/research), Jennifer Li (a16z) · 2026-02-06 · Watch on YouTube