Mati Staniszewski is a Polish technology entrepreneur, AI executive, and the co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, one of the world's fastest-growing AI companies focused on voice, audio, and conversational AI.

Founded in 2022 with his childhood friend Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs began by developing highly realistic AI-generated speech. It has since expanded into a much broader AI platform spanning voice generation, dubbing, conversational agents, creative audio, and enterprise communication.

Under Staniszewski's leadership, ElevenLabs has gone from startup to one of Europe's most valuable AI companies in only a few years. In February 2026, the company raised $500 million in Series D funding at an $11 billion valuation, bringing total funding to more than $780 million.

By May 2026, ElevenLabs had surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), after ending 2025 at approximately $350 million ARR.

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From Poland to AI Entrepreneurship

Staniszewski grew up in Poland, where he became interested in technology and artificial intelligence at a relatively young age.

He later moved to the United Kingdom to study Mathematics at Imperial College London.

His mathematical background would become highly relevant to his later work in machine learning and generative AI.

Before founding ElevenLabs, Staniszewski worked at several technology and financial companies, including Opera Software, BlackRock, and Palantir Technologies.

At Palantir, he worked as a deployment strategist, embedding with enterprises and governments to help them implement new technology.

This experience gave him something particularly valuable for a future founder:

an understanding of how advanced technology moves from research laboratories into real-world organizations.

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Meeting Piotr Dąbkowski

Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski have known each other since high school in Poland.

Dąbkowski later worked at Google, while Staniszewski worked at Palantir.

The two eventually began experimenting with artificial intelligence together.

Their shared interest wasn't initially focused exclusively on voice.

Instead, they were interested in the broader question of how AI could understand and reproduce human communication.

One of the inspirations came from their childhood experience watching American movies dubbed into Polish.

The dubbing often sounded unnatural, and the pair became interested in whether AI could eventually create more natural multilingual voices.

That idea became the foundation for ElevenLabs.

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Founding ElevenLabs

Staniszewski and Dąbkowski founded ElevenLabs in 2022.

The company's initial goal was ambitious:

Create AI-generated speech that sounded genuinely human.

At the time, synthetic voices often sounded robotic or lacked natural emotion, rhythm, and intonation.

ElevenLabs approached the problem differently.

Rather than treating speech as simply converting written words into sound, the company focused on capturing the characteristics that make human speech expressive.

The result was a technology capable of producing remarkably realistic voices.

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The Voice AI Breakthrough

ElevenLabs' early success came from its ability to generate voices that captured elements such as:

• Emotion
• Tone
• Rhythm
• Intonation
• Accent
• Pauses
• Speaking style
• Multilingual pronunciation

This made the technology useful for far more than simple text-to-speech.

Creators could use it for:

• Videos
• Podcasts
• Audiobooks
• Games
• Advertising
• Dubbing
• Narration
• Accessibility

The company's technology quickly attracted attention from creators and developers.

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Product-Led Growth

One of Staniszewski's important strategic decisions was allowing users to experience the technology directly.

Rather than requiring enterprise customers to go through lengthy sales processes, ElevenLabs made its voice technology accessible through a web application and APIs.

This created a powerful growth loop:

User discovers ElevenLabs → generates a voice → shares the result → others discover ElevenLabs → more users experiment.

For an AI company, this type of product-led distribution can be extremely powerful.

The product itself becomes the marketing.

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From Voice Generator to AI Platform

Staniszewski did not stop at text-to-speech.

ElevenLabs progressively expanded its product portfolio.

The company now operates across several major areas:

ElevenLabs Audio

AI-generated voices and speech synthesis.

ElevenLabs Dubbing

AI-powered translation and dubbing designed to preserve the original speaker's voice and characteristics.

ElevenLabs Creative

Tools for creators producing audio and other media.

ElevenLabs Music

AI-generated music capabilities.

ElevenAgents

Conversational AI agents capable of interacting with customers through voice.

This expansion reflects Staniszewski's larger vision.

The company is no longer simply building a voice generator.

It is building an AI communication platform.

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The Enterprise Opportunity

Enterprise adoption has become increasingly important to ElevenLabs.

Companies are using its technology for:

• Customer support
• Sales
• Marketing
• Employee training
• Internal workflows
• Conversational commerce
• Public services
• Multilingual communication

ElevenLabs reported that companies including Deutsche Telekom, Square, Revolut, and the Ukrainian government were deploying its technology for enterprise applications.

This represents a major shift from the company's early creator-focused audience.

ElevenAgents

One of Staniszewski's biggest strategic bets is ElevenAgents.

The product is designed to allow businesses to create AI agents capable of conducting natural conversations.

Instead of simply generating speech, the AI can:

Listen → Understand → Reason → Respond → Take action

This makes voice AI much more commercially valuable.

A customer could call a business and interact with an AI agent that can answer questions, access company information, complete tasks, and potentially transfer the conversation to a human when necessary.

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Voice as the Next Interface

Staniszewski believes voice could become one of the most important interfaces for interacting with AI.

In February 2026, he described voice as the next major interface for AI, arguing that humans may increasingly interact with technology through natural conversation rather than screens and menus.

This is a much larger vision than AI-generated speech.

The underlying thesis is:

Computers should adapt to humans rather than humans adapting to computers.

Instead of opening an application, finding the correct button, filling out forms, and navigating menus, people could simply speak.

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The End of the Screen-Centric Interface?

Staniszewski's vision suggests that AI could fundamentally change how we interact with computers.

For decades, computing has been dominated by:

Keyboard → Mouse → Touchscreen → Apps

The next stage could increasingly become:

Conversation → Voice → AI Agent → Action

The interface becomes less visible.

Users simply communicate what they want.

The AI handles the complexity underneath.

This could potentially affect everything from smartphones and customer service to cars, healthcare, education, entertainment, and enterprise software.

The $11 Billion Milestone

ElevenLabs' growth has been extraordinary.

In February 2026, the company announced a $500 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital.

The financing valued ElevenLabs at $11 billion, more than tripling its previous $3.3 billion valuation from January 2025.

The company said it had ended 2025 with more than $330 million in ARR.

That represented extraordinary growth for a company founded only four years earlier.

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From $330M to $500M+ ARR

The growth continued in 2026.

In May 2026, Staniszewski announced that ElevenLabs had crossed $500 million ARR.

The company had already surpassed that level within the first four months of the year, driven largely by enterprise adoption of voice agents.

That means ElevenLabs went from:

$100M ARR → $200M → $300M → $500M+

in an extraordinarily short period.

TechCrunch reported that the company took approximately 20 months to reach $100 million ARR, another 10 months to reach $200 million, and only about five months to move from $200 million to $300 million.

This makes ElevenLabs one of the fastest-scaling AI SaaS businesses in the market.

The Enterprise AI Agent Opportunity

Staniszewski increasingly sees voice agents as a much larger opportunity than voice generation alone.

Consider a traditional customer-support system.

A company might have:

• Website
• FAQ
• Chatbot
• Contact center
• CRM
• Human agents

An AI voice agent can potentially connect many of these systems together.

A customer calls.

The agent understands the request.

It retrieves information.

It reasons about the problem.

It responds naturally.

It can potentially execute the required action.

That changes the economics of customer service.

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AI and the Future of Work

Staniszewski's vision also extends beyond customer service.

AI agents could eventually assist with:

• Sales
• Recruiting
• Training
• Healthcare
• Education
• Hospitality
• Financial services
• Government services
• Internal company operations

ElevenLabs therefore sees voice as a gateway into a much broader agentic AI market.

Expanding Beyond Voice

One of the most interesting aspects of Staniszewski's strategy is that he does not appear to view ElevenLabs as permanently limited to voice.

The company's February 2026 funding announcement explicitly described ambitions to go beyond voice, including agents that can "talk, type, and take action."

This could eventually position ElevenLabs as a broader multimodal AI company.

Voice may simply be the company's entry point.

Creative AI

ElevenLabs has also expanded deeper into creative applications.

The company has introduced tools for:

• Voice creation
• Dubbing
• Sound effects
• Music
• Audiobooks
• Video production
• Character voices

This gives ElevenLabs exposure to the rapidly expanding creator economy.

It also creates a second growth engine alongside enterprise AI agents.

Working With Hollywood

Voice cloning creates obvious commercial opportunities—but also significant ethical and legal risks.

ElevenLabs has faced criticism around unauthorized voice cloning, particularly after synthetic voices resembling public figures circulated online.

The company has subsequently moved toward licensing and partnerships with major actors and creators.

Among the celebrities who have partnered with ElevenLabs are Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey.

This reflects a broader strategy:

Move from unauthorized imitation toward licensed digital identity.

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Responsible Voice AI

Voice technology creates a unique safety challenge.

A realistic synthetic voice can potentially be used for:

• Fraud
• Impersonation
• Misinformation
• Social engineering
• Political manipulation

ElevenLabs says it has built a dedicated safety team and a multilayered system designed to prevent, detect, and respond to misuse.

This has become an increasingly important part of Staniszewski's role as CEO.

The company must simultaneously maximize the creative potential of voice AI while controlling the risks associated with extremely realistic synthetic speech.

Building a Global AI Company

Although ElevenLabs has strong roots in Poland and the United Kingdom, Staniszewski has built the company as a global organization.

ElevenLabs now has operations spanning cities including:

• London
• New York
• San Francisco
• Warsaw
• Dublin
• Tokyo
• Seoul
• Singapore
• Bengaluru
• Sydney
• São Paulo
• Berlin
• Paris
• Mexico City

The company said its international expansion is intended to support enterprise adoption of ElevenAgents and ElevenCreative.

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The Founder Advantage

Staniszewski and Dąbkowski's relationship is an important part of ElevenLabs.

They were childhood friends who eventually became co-founders.

The division of responsibilities is relatively clear:

Mati Staniszewski — CEO

Piotr Dąbkowski — CTO

ElevenLabs says Dąbkowski previously worked at Google, while Staniszewski previously worked at Palantir.

The combination of business leadership and deep technical research has helped the company move quickly from research to commercial products.

Engineering and Research

Staniszewski has emphasized the importance of connecting cutting-edge research with practical products.

ElevenLabs invests heavily in research around:

• Speech synthesis
• Conversational AI
• Emotional AI
• Dubbing
• Multilingual models
• Audio intelligence
• Voice agents

The company describes its research mission as building AI capable of communicating at a human level.

This research-first approach helps explain why ElevenLabs has been able to compete with much larger technology companies.

A Different AI Strategy

ElevenLabs is operating in a market dominated by enormous companies such as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Amazon.

Yet Staniszewski has chosen a relatively focused strategy.

Instead of attempting to build a general-purpose AI model from day one, ElevenLabs concentrated on an overlooked modality:

voice.

That focus allowed the company to develop specialized expertise and build a strong product around a specific human-computer interaction problem.

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The "Voice First" Thesis

The underlying thesis is simple:

Humans communicate naturally through speech.

Computers have historically forced people to communicate through rigid interfaces.

AI can reverse that relationship.

If AI becomes capable of understanding context, emotion, intent, and language, voice can become a natural interface between humans and machines.

That is the opportunity Staniszewski is pursuing.

Leadership Philosophy

Several principles characterize Staniszewski's approach to building ElevenLabs.

1. Focus on an overlooked frontier

Rather than immediately competing in crowded AI categories, ElevenLabs concentrated on voice.

2. Build research and product together

Staniszewski emphasizes translating advanced AI research into products people can actually use.

3. Move quickly

The company's rapid ARR growth reflects an aggressive product-development and commercialization strategy.

4. Think globally

Voice and language are inherently global problems, making international expansion central to ElevenLabs.

5. Build for both creators and enterprises

The company has developed two complementary markets: creative users and enterprise customers.

6. Treat voice as an interface

The ultimate opportunity is not simply better speech synthesis.

It is changing how people interact with technology.

Mati Staniszewski – Key Facts

Full Name: Mateusz "Mati" Staniszewski
Profession: Entrepreneur, AI executive
Current Position: Co-Founder & CEO, ElevenLabs
Company Founded: 2022
Co-Founder: Piotr Dąbkowski
Previous Company: Palantir Technologies
Previous Role: Deployment Strategist
Education: Imperial College London
Degree: Mathematics
Nationality: Polish
Primary Base: London, UK
Industry: Artificial Intelligence / Voice AI / SaaS
ElevenLabs 2025 ARR: $330M+
ElevenLabs ARR in May 2026: $500M+
Series D: $500M
Series D Valuation: $11B
Total Funding: $781M+
Lead Series D Investor: Sequoia Capital
Known For: AI voice generation, ElevenAgents, conversational AI, AI dubbing, generative audio

Mati Staniszewski's Entrepreneurial Legacy

Mati Staniszewski's story is remarkable because of how quickly ElevenLabs moved from an experimental AI startup to a globally significant technology company.

He started with a very specific problem:

Make synthetic speech sound human.

But his ambition has expanded dramatically.

Today, ElevenLabs is building technology designed to allow computers to communicate naturally with humans.

The company's financial trajectory reinforces the scale of the opportunity. ElevenLabs reached more than $330 million ARR in 2025, crossed $500 million ARR in 2026, and reached an $11 billion valuation following its Series D.

But the most interesting part of Staniszewski's story isn't the valuation.

It is the thesis behind the company.

For decades, humans learned how to use computers through screens, buttons, menus, and applications.

Staniszewski believes that relationship can be reversed.

The computer should learn how to communicate with humans.

Voice is one of the most natural ways to accomplish that.

If ElevenLabs succeeds in turning voice into a mainstream interface for AI agents, Staniszewski could become one of the executives most responsible for moving computing from the screen era into the conversational era.

For CEO-Watch, that makes Mati Staniszewski one of the most important young CEOs to watch in AI—particularly as ElevenLabs moves beyond voice generation and competes for a much larger role in the future of AI agents, enterprise automation, and human-computer interaction.