AI audio startup ElevenLabs – a rival to Suno – simply secured strategic funding from the world’s most-valuable firm, NVIDIA
AI audio startup ElevenLabs has been gaining a good quantity of consideration within the music trade in latest months.
In August, the London and New York-headquartered firm launched Eleven Music – a rival to Suno and Udio – marking its enlargement past voice synthesis into full AI music technology.
Not like Suno and Udio, nevertheless, Eleven Music has already inked licensing agreements with distinguished rightsholders, together with Merlin and a doubtlessly precedent-setting deal with writer Kobalt.
Now, AI unicorn ElevenLabs has secured strategic funding from chip maker NVIDIA, the world’s most dear firm by market cap, value round $4.4 trillion as of Tuesday morning (September 23).
(NVIDIA has additionally simply this week confirmed to be investing as much as $100 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI.)
The brand new funding from NVIDIA (worth undisclosed) was confirmed by ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski at present.
Eleven Labs beforehand raised a $180 million Collection C funding spherical in January 2025, valuing it at $3.3 billion. Earlier this month, ElevenLabs launched a $100 million tender supply at a valuation of $6.6 billion to provide its workers “a chance for liquidity”.
The tender was led by current buyers Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from others, together with a16z, Smash Capital, World Innovation Lab, and “quite a few different insiders”.
In a LinkedIn submit sharing a video of a latest assembly with NVIDIA’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang, ElevenLabs’s Staniszewski, wrote: “We’re excited to share that NVIDIA is investing in ElevenLabs, with Jensen Huang’s assist.”
ElevenLabs’ video famous that it had beforehand partnered with NVIDIA in its “earliest days.”
Huang can also be a long-time fan of ElevenLabs’ tech. This summer time, he used an AI voice to relate a number of chapters of his Computex keynote in each English and Mandarin.
Based on ElevenLabs, he was “in a position to create the AI voice on ElevenLabs in underneath an hour with simply seven minutes of recorded audio”.
“Each time my voice is delivered digitally utilizing synthetic intelligence, it’s the ElevenLabs platform that I’m utilizing.”
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA
“Each time my voice is delivered digitally utilizing synthetic intelligence, it’s the ElevenLabs platform that I’m utilizing,” mentioned Huang within the newest video shared by Staniszewski.
He added: “Speech to textual content is simply know-how, proper? Textual content to Speech is artistry; that craft that goes right into a product that will get built-in with know-how, and also you guys are doing this at scale.”
Information of the funding into ElevenLabs arrives every week after NVIDIA unveiled a prolonged listing of UK-based companions throughout Jensen Huang’s go to to the nation.
“We’re excited to share that NVIDIA is investing in ElevenLabs, with Jensen Huang’s assist.”
Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs was recognized by NVIDIA as certainly one of its UK-based companions, noting in a weblog submit that ElevenLabs “develops AI voice know-how that generates pure, ultrarealistic speech in over 70 languages utilizing NVIDIA software program and NVIDIA DGX B200 techniques”.
NVIDIA added: “Its fashions energy real-time conversational brokers, localization, storytelling and accessibility instruments for individuals who have misplaced their voices, along with voicing audiobooks and animating online game characters.”
ElevenLabs confirmed final week that it “has labored carefully with NVIDIA within the UK and globally” and that “NVIDIA’s assist has helped the corporate construct sooner and ship stronger merchandise”.
Jensen Huang’s go to to the UK coincided with US President Donald Trump’s State go to to the UK, throughout which US corporations dedicated to a £150 billion funding within the UK’s tech sector.
“Final week’s US state go to to the UK strengthened AI partnerships between the 2 international locations and introduced main new investments from American corporations into the UK tech ecosystem,” wrote ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski in his LinkedIn submit.
“With our firm’s roots rising deeper in each locations, we couldn’t be extra optimistic in regards to the street forward.”
In Staniszewski’s video of his assembly with Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s boss tells ElevenLabs’ Co-founder to “make the most of all the things that NVIDIA has to supply”.
Huang added: ‘If there are any locations on this planet that you simply prefer to go to, however can’t, tell us. If there’s an organization you need to get to that you simply’re not in [with] but, let me know. We’ll simply type of get you in all places.”
ElevenLabs launched publicly in January 2023.
The NVIDIA funding in ElevenLabs arrives because the latter firm scales its UK and US operations. Based on ElevenLabs, over the previous 12 months, its UK headcount grew from 18 to 68 and its US headcount from 10 to 61, whereas the corporate’s European workforce expanded from 25 to 91.
ElevenLabs has places of work in New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Bangalore, Tokyo, and London.
In December 2024, it introduced a partnership with BMG’s father or mother firm Bertelsmann, which included plans so as to add AI-generated music options.
ElevenLabs has additionally just lately signed a coaching pact with SourceAudio, giving it entry to thousands and thousands of pre-cleared songs for AI coaching by means of SourceAudio’s dataset licensing program.
ElevenLabs’ proactive method to music licensing at the moment stands in distinction to opponents Suno and Udio, each of that are going through lawsuits from main report labels over alleged copyright infringement of their coaching information.
Whereas trade rumors counsel some main music corporations are in licensing discussions with Suno and/or Udio, no official agreements have been confirmed to this point.Music Enterprise Worldwide
