ElevenLabs hits $600 million in annual revenue, and its CEO says callers should know they're talking to AI

ElevenLabs is now at $600 million in annual recurring revenue, and more than half of it comes from big companies.

CEO Mati Staniszewski gave the number to Connie Loizos in an interview at Nrth, an entrepreneurship conference in Toronto, which TechCrunch published on September 24, 2026. He also said businesses should tell callers when they’re talking to an AI voice agent, at least for now.

TechCrunch reports ElevenLabs is valued at about $22 billion, a figure that goes back to a Bloomberg report from July. The interview didn’t get into Eleven Music, the company’s AI music generator, so I’ll cover that part at the end.

How much revenue does ElevenLabs make in 2026?

Loizos asked what share of the business is enterprise now. Staniszewski answered with the revenue number first: “We are now $600 million in ARR. Fifty-five percent plus is classic enterprise, and a big percentage of the [remaining] 45% are small and medium businesses, developers, builders, creators.”

ARR, or annual recurring revenue, is what a company’s current subscriptions and contracts would bring in over a full year.

Most people meet ElevenLabs on customer service calls, often without knowing it, according to TechCrunch. It names Klarna, which runs first-line phone support for 35 million US customers on ElevenLabs, plus Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Adobe and a growing list of governments.

Creators sit in the other 45%, next to small businesses and developers.

The number has nearly doubled in 9 months. When it raised its Series D in February, ElevenLabs said it closed 2025 with more than $330 million in ARR.

ElevenLabs valuation history: $3.3 billion to a reported $22 billion

The $22 billion figure did not come from the interview. TechCrunch links it to a Bloomberg report from July 2, 2026, which said ElevenLabs was in early talks with investors about an employee tender offer at roughly that price, citing people familiar with the matter.

A tender offer is when staff get to sell some of their shares to outside investors. The money goes to the employees, not the company, but the sale still puts a price on the whole business.

The tender was expected by September, according to The Next Web. I couldn’t find an ElevenLabs announcement that it has closed, so $22 billion is still a reported number.

The first 3 numbers come from ElevenLabs itself. It announced a $180 million Series C at $3.3 billion on January 30, 2025, then an employee tender at $6.6 billion in September 2025, then a $500 million Series D at $11 billion on February 4, 2026.

Why ElevenLabs’ CEO says callers should know they’re talking to AI

Loizos asked whether businesses should tell people when they’re talking to an agent instead of a human.

“

I think there should be disclosure at this time. Currently, people aren't used to it, and the common pattern is you don't want to feel cheated on that call.

He doesn’t see it as permanent. In 5 years, he said, “when everybody has their own agent working on their behalf, you’ll be calling in and expecting an agent,” and society will shift with it.

His suggested approach for now: if there’s a 30-minute wait for a human, offer the customer a choice. He said that in almost all cases people pick the agent, “and then they’re surprised by how good the experience is.”

The same question is coming up in music. This week Voice-Swap joined DDEX, the body that writes the metadata standards labels, distributors and streaming services use, to push for AI voice consent data inside release files.

Will ElevenLabs IPO in 2028? What Mati Staniszewski said

Loizos put a reported 2028 IPO date to him and asked him to confirm it. He didn’t.

“We’d love to create a company that stands the test of time. We are preparing the foundation to be able to do it in the next years. But whether we do it will depend on the time and place,” he said.

When Loizos pointed out that “years” is very vague, the transcript just says he laughed.

He has given a tighter window before. In March 2026, at the Capital Market Conference in Bukowina Tatrzańska in Poland, Staniszewski said ElevenLabs hopes to be ready for an IPO within the next 2 to 3 years, Bankier.pl reported in a story from the Polish news agency PAP Biznes.

He also said ElevenLabs is thinking about a dual listing, which means its shares would trade on 2 stock exchanges at once, with Warsaw as one of them.

How ElevenLabs’ CEO answered on margins, Decagon and open-weight models

Gross margin is what’s left of each dollar after paying for the models and computing power that deliver the product. Staniszewski said up front he’d give “a vague answer”.

He said ElevenLabs passes savings on to customers where it can, and that “we don’t mind the margins going lower to actually benefit together as the value gets created in the next five years.”

TechCrunch also raised Decagon, a conversational AI platform that trained its voice product on ElevenLabs and now competes with it. Staniszewski didn’t name Decagon. He said the lines between model, platform and application companies are “much more blurry” now, and gave Anthropic as an example of a model company that has become a platform too.

Loizos also asked which AI model sits behind an ElevenLabs agent. Customers pick this “reasoning layer”, the model that decides what the agent says, from a menu. Open-weight models are ones whose trained files are published so anyone can run them, and frontier models are the newest, most capable ones from the big AI labs.

Staniszewski called it “less of a binary choice”. For informational calls where the agent takes no action, open-source models work, because the company’s knowledge base defines a good answer.

For financial services, with logins, transactions and refunds, “There’s no room for error. Here, frontier models will still lead.”

Eleven Music in 2026: the part of ElevenLabs the interview skipped

The interview didn’t cover Eleven Music. The only mention of music is in TechCrunch’s intro, which lists it next to audiobooks and dubbing as something creators use ElevenLabs for.

Here’s what ElevenLabs has done in music this year, from my own coverage:

• February 2026: the $500 million Series D at an $11 billion valuation came with confirmed plans to expand ElevenLabs’ creative products, including Eleven Music.
• March 19, 2026: ElevenLabs launched the Music Marketplace inside ElevenCreative, where creators publish Eleven Music tracks and get paid in USD or credits when buyers license them.
• September 10, 2026: Universal Music Group signed a multi-year licensing deal with ElevenLabs, the first major-label deal ElevenLabs has signed. The first product is a fan platform for remixes and mashups that is still in development.
• September 14, 2026: ElevenLabs released Music v2.5 as the new default model in Eleven Music, and said the UMG deal is separate from it.

Nothing in the interview announced a change to Eleven Music’s pricing, terms or models. The UMG fan platform is the one music product ElevenLabs has announced but not shipped, and it still has no launch date.