Today, AI-powered synthetic voice cloning company ElevenLabs announced that it has closed its $80 million series B round. The new funding gives the two-year-old startup a valuation of more than $1 billion, up from $100 million last June. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, and other investors included Sequoia Capital and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
Thanks to ElevenLabs’ speech generation application, users can even adjust voice characteristics such as tone and cadence to produce realistic-sounding voices. Users can also enter text to have the voice read and load pre-existing voice samples to be cloned. CEO Mati Staniszewski claims ElevenLabs is now used by employees at 41% of Fortune 500 companies, but its reputation has perhaps been cemented by its embrace among online AI tinkerers.
Staniszewski told TechCrunch that the new round will be used for product development and “increasing security measures to ensure responsible and ethical development of AI technology.” This isn’t something the company has always focused on. Message board 4chan has used technology to create harmful messages in the voices of celebrities such as actress Emma Watson. Reporters including The Verge’s James Vincent and Vice’s Joseph Cox used ElevenLabs to create hateful content records and spoof a bank’s identity verification system, respectively. ElevenLabs says that removing users who create malicious content from the platform works. .
The company has recently been investing in technology to create audiobooks and dub movies and TV shows. Other applications include creating character voices for games (which can put many gamers out of work). In the coming weeks, ElevenLabs will release dubbing tools that can create and edit transcripts and translations. A mobile application that can explain web pages and texts is also on the way.
Voice actors criticized the company for using samples of their work without their permission, saying these samples could be used to promote content they disagree with or spread misinformation. To ensure that players receive adequate compensation, the company plans to open a marketplace for voices. The marketplace will allow users to create an audio, share it, and receive credit toward ElevenLabs’ premium offering each time the audio is used.