London/New York-based voice AI startup ElevenLabs has raised $19 million in a Series A funding round. A self-titled voice technology research lab, the company intends to use the $19 million to press forward with voice AI research projects and additional product deployments. According to Business Insider, the company's valuation is estimated to be in the neighbourhood of $100 million.
Speaking of product deployments, in conjunction with the announcement of the Series A round, ElevenLabs is today releasing a service that the company says will allow anyone to create an entire audiobook on the platform in a matter of minutes, as well as an AI speech detection model.
ElevenLabs’ $19 million Series A round was led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, former Head of AI at Y Combinator Daniel Gross, and Andreessen Horowitz. Additional participants in the round include Credo Ventures, Concept Ventures, Storytel, one of the world's largest audiobook publishers, and content creator platform TheSoul Publishing.
And if that weren’t enough, angel investors in the round include Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus VR co-founder Brendan Iribe, Deepmind & Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, Perplexity AI co-founder Aravind Srinivas, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly, Creator Ventures and SV Angel. Storytel, one of the world's largest audiobook publishers, and content creator platform TheSoul Publishing are also backing the company.
Founded in 2022 by best friends Piotr Karwatka, an ex-Google machine learning engineer, and Mati Staniszewski, an ex-Palantir deployment strategist, ElevenLabs is taking those “well this is obviously an AI-generated voice-over” snippets to the level of those almost indistinguishable from a real human voice.
An example of ElevenLabs tech:
Turning text into speech using synthetic voices, cloned voices, or completely new voices that can be tailored according to gender, age, and accent preferences, ElevenLabs’ tech has seen tremendous interest an uptake from multiple creative verticals and sectors ranging from independent authors creating audiobooks, developers voicing characters in video games, supporting the visually impaired to access online written content, and powering the world’s first AI radio channel, Super Hi-Fi.
"Our mission is to be the ultimate tool for storytelling, dissolving language barriers and putting all audiences in the reach of all content creators in a safe and responsible way,” says Staniszewski. “With an incredible, growing team and these exceptional investors, ElevenLabs is now ever closer to realising its long-term goal of making all content universally accessible in any language and any voice.”
If the name ElevenLabs is ringing any bells, yes, it’s the same technology that made headlines in late January when Vice reported that 4Chan trolls were using the platform “to make deepfake voices of Emma Watson, Joe Rogan, and others saying racist, transphobic, and violent things.”
Crazy weekend - thank you to everyone for trying out our Beta platform. While we see our tech being overwhelmingly applied to positive use, we also see an increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases. We want to reach out to Twitter community for thoughts and feedback!
— ElevenLabs (@elevenlabsio) January 30, 2023
The company then went on to explain:
While we can trace back any generated audio back to the user, we’d like to address this by implementing additional safeguards.
— ElevenLabs (@elevenlabsio) January 30, 2023
and
Our current ideas:
(1) Additional account verifications to enable Voice Cloning: such as payment info or even full ID verification
(2) Verifying copyright to the voice by submitting sample with prompted text
(3) Drop Voice Lab altogether and manually verify each Cloning Request— ElevenLabs (@elevenlabsio) January 30, 2023
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