ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs is building the future of Automatic Dubbing
Details
The Founders.
Two childhood friends on a mission to change audio.
Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski first met as teenagers at Copernicus High School in Warsaw. Growing up, they shared a love of cinema — and an irritation at the clumsy dubs that stripped performances of their original nuance. Years later, they would return to that problem with the ambition to solve it at scale.
Mati studied Mathematics at Imperial and went on to build a career spanning Opera, BlackRock, and Palantir, where he deployed frontier technologies for governments and Fortune 500 firms.
Piotr studied Engineering at Oxford and Philosophy at Cambridge, before starting his technical career at Google, later contributing to infrastructure at Tessian and Google Shopping.
Together, they brought a rare mix of deep technical expertise and real-world deployment experience — the perfect combination for building the next generation of voice technology.
What others missed...
What we saw when others couldn't
Over black Americanos one morning in April of 2022, Mati’s conviction was unmistakable. He spoke with animated passion about his obsession with the number eleven, and more importantly, about the transformative potential of their technology: how it could underpin the highest-stakes scenarios, from Hollywood film dubbing to live sports broadcasting. That conversation wasn’t about market sizing slides — it was about ambition, resilience, and clarity of thought.
We left Beam convinced. Where others saw risk, we saw two exceptional founders with the drive and imagination to carve out a new category. Our belief wasn’t that voice was “already big” — it was that with Mati and Piotr at the helm, it would be.
What happened next...
The Breakthrough
In January 2023, ElevenLabs launched its beta. Within months, millions of users had generated over 1,000 years of audio. Creators published 5,000+ AI voices, with over $2M paid out directly to them. The company’s APIs quickly found their way into workflows at 60% of Fortune 500 firms, with names like The Washington Post, ESPN, Chess.com, NVIDIA, and Paradox Interactive relying on ElevenLabs technology.
Where They Are Now
As of summer 2025, ElevenLabs has raised $280M across four rounds, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ, and others. Today, their models don’t just replicate voices — they unlock the ability for any voice to speak any language with near-perfect fidelity. And voice is just the start.
What’s Next
For Mati and Piotr, the opportunity is boundless. Voice is the most human of interfaces, and ElevenLabs is building the rails for a future where content, communication, and culture flow seamlessly across borders. For us, they remain a reminder of why we do what we do: back exceptional people early, sometimes before the market even knows it’s ready, and build the kind of founder relationships that endure for decades.
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