ElevenLabs CEO at Nrth: AI voice business hits $600M ARR, $22B valuation

At the Nrth entrepreneurship conference in Toronto in September 2026, ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski discussed the company's AI voice business, which he said is now pacing at $600 million in annual recurring revenue. The company is reportedly valued at $22 billion by its backers, according to a Bloomberg report.

Staniszewski said enterprise customers including Klarna, Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, and Adobe use ElevenLabs' voice models. Klarna, for example, runs first-line phone support for 35 million U.S. customers on the platform. He also said businesses should currently disclose when customers are talking to an AI, arguing that people are not yet used to the technology and should not feel deceived on a call. However, he suggested that in five years, when many people have their own agents, expectations may shift.

Asked about gross margins, Staniszewski declined to provide details but said he does not mind margins being squeezed further if it helps the company gain market share. He also revisited his earlier prediction that audio models would be commoditized, saying that model-level quality differences are still significant today but will likely shrink over three to five years. He said ElevenLabs aims to be the first to pass the Turing test for conversational AI, which requires combining intelligence with emotional intelligence.