No Priors Ep. 143 | With ElevenLabs Co-Founder Mati Staniszewski
Sarah Guo (host), Mati Staniszewski (guest), Elad Gil (host)
In this episode of No Priors, featuring Sarah Guo and Mati Staniszewski, No Priors Ep. 143 | With ElevenLabs Co-Founder Mati Staniszewski explores elevenLabs Bets Big On Voice As The Future Interface Sara Guo interviews ElevenLabs co‑founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski about building a foundational audio company that powers both creative voice generation and real‑time conversational agents. He explains how ElevenLabs grew to $300M ARR and 350 employees by pairing deep audio research with productized platforms for creators and enterprises. The discussion covers use cases like dubbing, customer support, immersive media, education, and even “agentic government,” as well as how they sequence research, navigate competition from big labs and open source, and think about model commoditization. They close by exploring how voice will reshape interfaces, education, and personal assistants over the next decade.
ElevenLabs Bets Big On Voice As The Future Interface
Sara Guo interviews ElevenLabs co‑founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski about building a foundational audio company that powers both creative voice generation and real‑time conversational agents. He explains how ElevenLabs grew to $300M ARR and 350 employees by pairing deep audio research with productized platforms for creators and enterprises. The discussion covers use cases like dubbing, customer support, immersive media, education, and even “agentic government,” as well as how they sequence research, navigate competition from big labs and open source, and think about model commoditization. They close by exploring how voice will reshape interfaces, education, and personal assistants over the next decade.
Key Takeaways
Pair deep research with focused product layers to unlock real value.
ElevenLabs structures work into ‘labs’—small cross‑functional teams that first solve a core technical problem (e. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Voice is evolving into the primary interface for many technologies.
Staniszewski argues that keyboards and screens are anachronistic for many tasks; natural speech will increasingly mediate interactions with phones, computers, robots, and services, requiring high‑quality, expressive, low‑latency audio models.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Personalization and voice selection are as important as raw model quality.
Enterprises often don’t know how to ‘choose’ a voice, so ElevenLabs supports them with internal ‘voice sommeliers’ and dynamic voice routing based on user segments, proving that tone, accent, and emotion heavily drive user perception.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Conversational agents are moving from reactive support to proactive experiences.
Customers like Meesho use agents not just for refunds and tracking, but as front‑door shopping assistants that help discover products and guide checkout, pointing to a shift from narrow support bots to full journey companions.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Model superiority is a head start, not a permanent moat.
ElevenLabs expects base models to commoditize within a few years; they view research as a 6–12 month advantage that lets them build better products and, more importantly, an ecosystem of voices, integrations, and workflows that compound over time.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Specialization in audio architectures can beat larger generalist labs.
Despite competition from OpenAI and Google, ElevenLabs claims to outperform them on key audio benchmarks by focusing on architectural breakthroughs rather than sheer scale, and by concentrating some of the world’s top audio researchers under one roof.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Education and government are poised for transformation via voice agents.
From chess. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Notable Quotes
“We at ElevenLabs are solving how humans and technology interact, how you can create seamlessly with that technology.”
— Mati Staniszewski
“Instead of having it just translated, could you have the original voice, original emotions, original intonation carried across?”
— Mati Staniszewski
“If you are looking for a solution across a set of different use cases that you want our engineering help and deploy that, then we are the right solution and probably the best solution.”
— Mati Staniszewski
“Research is a head start. All it is, is a head start in being able to accelerate the future a little bit closer.”
— Mati Staniszewski
“I think learning with AI with voice, where it’s on your headphone or in a speaker, is just going to be such a big thing where you have your own teacher on demand who understands you very personally.”
— Mati Staniszewski
Questions Answered in This Episode
How should enterprises decide when to adopt voice agents across multiple touchpoints versus starting with a single narrow use case like customer support?
Sara Guo interviews ElevenLabs co‑founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski about building a foundational audio company that powers both creative voice generation and real‑time conversational agents. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What new metrics or evaluation frameworks are needed to rigorously assess voice quality, emotion, and user trust beyond standard audio benchmarks?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
As base models commoditize, what will ultimately differentiate leading AI voice platforms: data, distribution, ecosystem, or something else?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can education systems integrate AI voice tutors responsibly without undermining critical human‑to‑human social and emotional development?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What governance and ethical guardrails are necessary when governments deploy ‘agentic’ voice interfaces for citizen services at national scale?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
(music plays) Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Madis Senžus, the co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, which was founded to change the way we interact with each other and with computers with voice. Over three short years, they've skyrocketed to more than 300 million in run rate. Madis and I talk about the future of voice, education, customer experience, and the other applications of this voice, as well as how to build a multi-segment from self-serve to enterprise and combined research and product company. Welcome, Madis.
Sara, thanks for having me.
And thank you for doing this at seven in the morning.
Our pleasure. Thank you for doing that at seven in the morning. It's great we- we- we- we got to finally do this together.
Uh, I think a lot of our listeners will have used or played with Eleven at some point, but for everybody else, can you just reintroduce the company?
Definitely. We at ElevenLabs, we are solving how humans and technology interact, how you can create seamlessly with that technology. Um, what this means in practice is we build foundational audio models, so models in a space to help you create speech that sounds human, understand speech in a much better way, or orchestrate all those components to make it interactive, and then build products on top of that foundational models. And we have our creative product, which is a platform for helping you with narrations, for audiobooks, with voiceovers, for ads or movies, or dubs of those movies to other languages. And our agents, uh, platform product, which is effectively an offering to help you elevate customer experience, build an agent for personal AI, education, new ways of immersive, immersive media. Uh, but all this kind of under-underlied with that mission of solving how we can interact with technology on our terms in a better way.
You started the company in 2022?
That's right.
And you've had amazing, like, rocket ship growth since then. I'm sure it's felt up and down different ways. I want to ask you about that. Uh, can you give a sense of what the scale of the company is today?
So we've grown to 350 people globally. We started from, from Europe. We started as a remote company, and are still first, remote first, but have hubs around the world, with London being the biggest, New York being second biggest, Warsaw, San Francisco, and now Tokyo, and, and one in Brazil. We are at, uh, 300 million in, in, in ARR, which is, uh, roughly 50/50 between self-serve, so a lot of subscription and creators using our creative platform, and then approaching 50, uh, percent on the enterprise side using our agents platform, uh, uh, work. And that's on the sales-led, uh, classic sales-led side. And we serve more than five million monthly actives on that, on that, on that creative, uh, side of the work. And then on the enterprise side, we have a few thousand customers from Fortune 500s to some of the fastest AI growing startups.
Install uListen to search the full transcript and get AI-powered insights
Get Full TranscriptGet more from every podcast
AI summaries, searchable transcripts, and fact-checking. Free forever.
Add to Chrome