The business revealed its $80 million Series B financing on Monday, January 22. It stated that the money would be utilized, among other things, to launch new products and enhance security protocols in order to “ensure responsible and ethical development of AI technology.”
ElevenLabs stated in its release that it had achieved “unicorn” status—a phrase for a privately held firm valued at more than $1 billion—but it did not provide a precise figure. The CEO of the company, Mati Staniszewski, confirmed the precise amount to Bloomberg News: $1.1 billion.
Along with the investment announcement, ElevenLabs disclosed the debut of a number of new products, such as a voice library marketplace where users may profit from artificial intelligence (AI) renditions of their own voices and a new dubbing studio that allows users to dub entire movies.
“Users can create their professional AI voice replica, verify it, and share it via Voice Library,” the company’s announcement said. “When others use these verified voices, the original creators receive compensation. Users always retain control over their voice’s availability and compensation terms.”
Over the past year, there has been a surge in funding for businesses that mimic human speech using artificial intelligence (AI), but there has also been an increase in worries that the technology might be misused.
She continued, “Fraudsters are using AI to not just launch attacks, but to get really excellent at it.
In response to these concerns, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the Voice Cloning Challenge last year and invited suggestions on how to stop this technology from being abused.
Samuel Levine, the director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, stated at the time, “We want to address harms before they hit the marketplace and enforce the law when they do.”
According to the release, advances in text-to-speech AI have led to developments in voice cloning technology.
The FTC points out that although voice cloning has promise uses, such as helping those who are voiceless, it can also be abused. Scammers could, for instance, use voice cloning to pose as friends, family, or company officials, deceiving unwary customers and causing them financial harm.
ElevenLabs stated on Monday that it was focusing on developing detection tools to ensure that content generated by artificial intelligence could be easily identified, as part of its commitment to the “safe and responsible development of AI.”
Launched in 2023, the startup’s AI Speech Classifier can determine whether an audio sample contains content produced by ElevenLabs. This year, the company wants to improve the tool so that it covers additional speech AI models.