ElevenLabs closes a $300 million employee tender at a $22 billion valuation, 4 times Suno's

ElevenLabs is now worth $22 billion, and this time it’s official.

The company said on September 30, 2026 that it closed a $300 million employee tender offer at that price. It’s double the $11 billion of its Series D in February.

Bloomberg first reported the talks in July, and when ElevenLabs’ CEO talked about $600 million in revenue last week, the $22 billion was still unconfirmed. Now it’s in ElevenLabs’ own blog post.

How the ElevenLabs employee tender works

A tender isn’t a funding round. ElevenLabs staff sold some of the shares they already own to outside investors, and the money went to them, not to the company.

The sale still puts a price on the whole business. If investors pay a set amount per share, that price times all the shares is the valuation.

It’s ElevenLabs’ third employee tender since September 2025. The first was $100 million at $6.6 billion in September 2025, and a second $100 million ran alongside the Series D in May, Music Business Worldwide reports.

ElevenLabs says it now has more than 800 people, up from 530 in May.

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As we grow, it's important to us to let our people share in some of the value they are creating for our customers and the wider world.

Who bought into ElevenLabs at $22 billion

Wellington and T. Rowe Price led the tender. 6 investors came in for the first time: BDT & MSD, EQT, GIC, Goldman Sachs, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Sapphire Ventures.

2 of those new names already sit inside the music business:

• GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, owns 4.7% of Universal Music Group and agreed in January to form a music-rights buying venture with Sony Music Group.
• EQT co-owns Believe, which licenses its catalogue to AI companies and signed its own deal with ElevenLabs in April.

Existing backers Alkeon, Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw, DISRUPTIVE, Evantic, ICONIQ and Lightspeed also took part. Alkeon and Lightspeed are in Suno too, both in its June Series D.

ElevenLabs valuation history: $9 million to $22 billion in 4 years

ElevenLabs raised its first round at a $9 million valuation in 2022, alongside Eleven v1, its first text-to-speech model. Here’s how the price has moved since 2025:

For comparison, Suno raised over $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation in June. That makes ElevenLabs worth about 4 times Suno on paper, though the two numbers come from different kinds of deals, a share sale and a funding round.

Where ElevenMusic fits in ElevenLabs’ $22 billion business

The announcement is about voice agents. Enterprise customers now make up 55% of ElevenLabs’ revenue, and the company says its tech runs in daily operations at 5 of the world’s 10 largest tech companies.

Its ElevenAgents platform handles over 15 million conversations a week, 3 times the volume in February, according to MBW. ElevenLabs also released 2 new text-to-speech models the same week, Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo.

The blog post doesn’t mention music at all, and ElevenLabs doesn’t break out what ElevenMusic earns. September was still a busy month on the music side:

• September 10, 2026: Universal Music Group signed a multi-year deal with ElevenLabs to build a fan platform for remixes and mashups, separate from the ElevenMusic app.
• September 14, 2026: ElevenLabs shipped Music v2.5 as ElevenMusic’s new default model.

ElevenMusic launched in August 2025 with licences from Merlin and Kobalt, and added Believe this year. The UMG fan platform still has no launch date.