Start with the arrangement that is easy to miss. Klarna does not staff its own first-line phone support for 35 million US customers. A model from ElevenLabs answers those calls instead.
The same setup repeats across telecom operators, software vendors and a growing list of governments, all licensing the same voice stack. Creators form the second market, using it for audiobooks, dubbing and music.
Annual recurring revenue is pacing at $600M, and backers reportedly value the four-year-old company at $22B. That figure is reported rather than announced, so the round remains unconfirmed.
Trouble has arrived from a familiar direction. Decagon trained its conversational voice product on ElevenLabs and now competes with it, a pattern other customers could copy.
Price is the other pressure. Google released two new speech models this week, one tuned for cost, while Cartesia and a string of startups keep climbing the quality leaderboards.
ElevenLabs is betting on stickiness instead of supremacy. Catalogue deals with rights holders and long enterprise contracts are slower to lose than an API endpoint is to undercut.
