Nvidia is to make a "strategic" investment in UK AI startup ElevenLabs, as the AI-audio generator looks to bring in strategic partners in a bid to grow its business over the long term. The investment for an undisclosed amount marks the first time the US chip giant will have invested in UK unicorn ElevenLabs, which was founded in 2022.
ElevenLabs CEO and co-founder Mati Staniszewski said: “We need strategic partners. It is a good combination where they are coming in with more than capital. They are strategically bringing in the GPUs, which they have inside-out knowledge of. It is mostly from the strategic angle.
“Currently, we don’t need the extra capital and now we are thinking about the strategic partners that we can really bring in for the next ten years.”
The investment will be structured as a standard in-between round, said Staniszewski, speaking today at an event in London hosted by ElevenLabs, showcasing how companies were using its AI voice agents.
Staniszewski did not reveal details of how much Nvidia was investing in ElevenLabs, which is also backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. ElevenLabs trains its own text-to-speech and speech-to-text AI models, powered by Nvidia’s GPUs.
Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang listed several UK startups Nvidia was investing in, at an event in London, as part of a giant £2bn investment in UK AI startups. These were Wayve, Oxa, Revolut, PolyAI, Synthesia, Latent Labs and Basecamp Research.
ElevenLabs was also on the list, but it is understood Huang did not read its name out, as it was on a different page from the other startups mentioned. Huang did, though, namecheck ElevenLabs as a notable startup building in the UK.
Earlier this month, ElevenLabs confirmed an employee share sale valuing it at $6.6bn, which was double its valuation of nine months previous. In January this year, ElevenLabs tripled its valuation to $3.3.bn following a $180m funding round.
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments