Mati Staniszewski
Co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs
Education and early career
Mati Staniszewski grew up in Poland, where he and Piotr Dabkowski, his future co-founder, were high school friends[1]. The two later moved to the UK, where Staniszewski studied at Imperial College and Dabkowski at Oxford[1]. ElevenLabs also lists Imperial College London as Staniszewski's alma mater[2].
Before founding ElevenLabs, Staniszewski worked at Palantir as a deployment strategist with Fortune 500 companies and governments[3]. Earlier, he worked at BlackRock, where he helped launch the Aladdin Wealth platform[3].
Founding ElevenLabs
Staniszewski and Dabkowski founded ElevenLabs in 2022[4]. Endeavor, which selected the company for its network, wrote that the pair were inspired by the lektors they grew up with in Poland: a single male voice actor who reads all the parts of a foreign film in a monotone over the original soundtrack[1]. ElevenLabs began as a research company that aimed to build better text-to-speech models from first principles before turning them into customer products[1].
Staniszewski is the company's co-founder and CEO, and ElevenLabs is based in London[3][4]. The company describes itself as an AI research and product company and says it started by building a human-like voice model before expanding beyond voice[2].
Products and platforms
ElevenLabs organizes its work into three platforms[2]. ElevenAgents lets businesses build and deploy AI voice and chat agents for customer support, sales and other uses, powered by the company's real-time text-to-speech and speech-to-text models[2]. ElevenCreative lets creators and marketers generate and edit speech, music, sound effects, images and video in more than 90 languages, with tools such as voice cloning, voice design and AI dubbing[2]. ElevenAPI gives developers access to its audio foundation models through low-latency streaming and SDKs[2].
The company runs an Impact Program that gives free licenses to people with accessibility needs and to nonprofit organizations in healthcare, education and culture[2]. It says it has a dedicated safety team drawn from research, engineering and policy, and uses layered safeguards to prevent and detect misuse[2].
Funding and growth
In January 2025 ElevenLabs raised a $180 million Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz, at a valuation of $3.3 billion[1][4]. On 4 February 2026 the company said it had raised $500 million in a Series D round led by Sequoia Capital, at an $11 billion valuation[4]. New investors in that round included Lightspeed Venture Partners and Evantic Capital, alongside existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ[4].
Reuters reported that ElevenLabs generated more than $330 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, and that Staniszewski told the Wall Street Journal he hoped to double that figure in 2026[4]. The company said it would use the new funds for international expansion and for research on emotional conversational models and dubbing[4]. Staniszewski said in a statement that ElevenLabs planned to expand its creative offering and help businesses build agents that can talk, type and take action[4].
Staniszewski attended the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos in January 2026[4]. He spoke at London Tech Week on 8 June 2026 in a session titled The Future of Human-Technology Interaction[3].
Known for
- Co-founding ElevenLabs
- Leading ElevenLabs to an $11 billion valuation in 2026
- Previous work at Palantir and BlackRock
Sources
- Endeavor: Why we selected ElevenLabs — checked 6 Nov 2026
- ElevenLabs: About — checked 6 Nov 2026
- London Tech Week 2026: Mati Staniszewski speaker page — checked 6 Nov 2026
- The Star (Reuters): ElevenLabs raises $500 million at $11 billion valuation, February 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026