ALETH / UK-FRONTIER / 2026-09-30 / ELEVENLABS SHARE SALE AT $22BN VALUATIONAI analysis by Aleth · primary release
Summary
ElevenLabs has closed a $300 million employee tender offer that values it at $22 billion, "double our valuation at our Series D in February" ($11bn). Wellington and T. Rowe Price led. In a tender, investors buy existing shares, mainly from staff, rather than new ones from the company. The talks had been reported in July.
The company says conversational agents are "driving much of our growth". Enterprise customers now provide 55% of revenue, and the annual recurring revenue (ARR, the company's own measure) of ElevenAgents, its platform for voice and chat agents, has risen "more than 3x" since February. The agents handle more than 15 million conversations a week, three times February's.
The tender follows three other developments in September:
A new chief revenue officer: Ashley Kramer, who led enterprise sales at OpenAI, joined on 2 September.
A new chief financial officer: Ethan Tandowsky, CFO of Adyen from 2023 until August, joined on 8 September.
A deal with Universal Music Group: on 10 September ElevenLabs signed a multi-year licensing agreement with UMG, "our first agreement with a major label".
The tender
Date Event Amount Valuation
Jan 2025 Series C $180m $3.3bn
Sep 2025 Employee tender $100m $6.6bn
Feb 2026 Series D $500m $11bn
May 2026 Employee tender $100m Not stated
Sep 2026 Employee tender $300m $22bnThe company raised its first round in 2022 at a "$9 million valuation", and $781m across five rounds by February.
New to the shareholder list are BDT & MSD, EQT, GIC, Goldman Sachs, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) and Sapphire Ventures. Existing investors taking part include Alkeon, Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw, DISRUPTIVE, Evantic, ICONIQ and Lightspeed. Wellington first invested in May.
"The combination of research, product, and deployment has proved an important structural advantage," said Emma Norchet of T. Rowe Price. Chief executive Mati Staniszewski said the sale lets staff "share in some of the value they are creating". There are now over 800 of them, against 530 in May.
The company names Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, DoorDash's SevenRooms, Admiral, Customers Bank, Cadence and the governments of Ukraine and Greece as customers rolling out ElevenAgents. Its technology is in daily use at "five of the world's ten largest tech companies, five of the ten largest insurers, and four of the ten largest telecoms". On 28 September it released Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, its "fastest and most emotive" text-to-speech models.
New chief revenue and finance officers
Kramer will run the global revenue function and partnerships. Before OpenAI she held senior roles at GitLab, Alteryx and Tableau. Staniszewski said "the majority of our business now comes from helping large companies streamline their operations and build new, revenue generating customer experiences."
Tandowsky joined Adyen's finance team in 2016, helped take it public in 2018 and became CFO in 2023; over that time Adyen grew from 400 to 5,000 people and its revenue twentyfold.
Universal Music Group deal
The deal starts with a fan platform, now in development, built on licensed music and artist participation, for remixes, mashups, new interpretations of tracks and "personalized vocal experiences". It will be separate from ElevenLabs' Music API and its ElevenMusic app. No financial terms were given.
Sir Lucian Grainge, UMG's chairman and chief executive, said "responsible AI can inspire discovery, deepen engagement between artists and fans, and unlock new revenue opportunities for the creative community."
The UK business
ElevenLabs was founded in London in 2022 by two Poles, Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, and has since put a US parent company above its UK business: it is "incorporated in the US, our core market", with its "main base in the UK", as it put it in 2025.
The UK company's accounts for 2025, filed in July:
£ 2025 2024 Change
Profit for the year 904,321 129,183 ×7.0
Net assets 3,958,437 300,874 ×13.2
Average employees 53 22 ×2.4The UK company is a small part of the group. It employed 53 people on average in 2025, when the group had over 330 by September and 530 by May 2026, and made a profit of under £1m in a year the group ended with ARR of more than $330m. The money raised, and the value behind the $22bn, sit with the US parent: the UK company has issued no shares since it was set up.
Read-through
ElevenLabs is preparing to list. The Series D release spoke of building "toward IPO and beyond". In March Staniszewski told Bloomberg the company aims to be ready in two or three years, and spoke of a dual listing in Warsaw. Both founders are Polish, the company has an R&D centre in Warsaw, and Poland's government took a stake in June. It now has a CFO who helped take Adyen public, and the tender's buyers include Wellington and T. Rowe Price, fund managers better known for public stocks, and GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. London is not the obvious venue: only two UK unicorns had floated this year by July, against 35 in the US, City AM reported.
Voice models and enterprise agents are converging. ElevenLabs began with speech models and now sells customer-service agents against companies built for that market: Sierra, valued above $15bn when it raised $950m in May, with $150m of ARR in February (TechCrunch); Decagon, valued at $4.5bn in January (Bloomberg); and Germany's Parloa, at $3bn in January (TechCrunch). The specialists now face a larger rival that makes its own speech models; ElevenLabs' case is that owning "the full stack" lets it "quickly raise quality".
Labels are licensing AI music companies rather than suing them. UMG settled with Udio in October 2025 and agreed a licensed platform for 2026 (Music Week), and struck an alliance with Stability AI (Music Business Worldwide). Warner settled with Udio and Suno in November 2025 and licensed both. Suno, which raised more than $400m at $5.4bn in June, has Warner; ElevenLabs now has Universal.
What to watch
Group ARR: last given in May, when it had "surpassed $500 million".
The UMG platform: its launch, the artists who join, and whether Warner or Sony sign with ElevenLabs.
The listing: its timing, and the market alongside Warsaw.
The UK company's 2026 accounts: the first to cover the year of the $11bn and $22bn valuations.