The AI voice startup closes a $300 million tender offer that values the company at $22 billion, double what it was seven months ago. The founders reach an estimated fortune of $1.8 billion each.
The AI voice startup ElevenLabs has closed a tender offer of $300 million that values the company at $22 billion, as reported by ecosistemastartup.com. This figure doubles the $11 billion from its Series D in February and marks the third liquidity event for employees in just over a year.
The operation, announced on September 30, is not a typical funding round: investors buy shares from employees who already held them, meaning the capital does not enter the company's coffers but goes into the pockets of the team. The transaction was co-led by Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price, with first-time participation from EQT, Goldman Sachs, GIC, OTPP, Sapphire Ventures, and BDT & MSD. Historical investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, ICONIQ, D.E. Shaw, Evantic, DISRUPTIVE, and Alkeon also participated.
The founders, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, former members of Forbes' Under 30 Europe list, were already in the billionaire club before this operation. Forbes estimates that each has amassed around $1.8 billion following the tender, a fortune built in just four years since the company's founding in 2022.
"If we want to create the reference company in AI of this generation, we need to gain scale, and that is what we are doing," Staniszewski told Forbes.
The company has also attracted attention for eliminating hierarchical titles: there are no titles, everyone is simply part of the team.
The engine justifying the new valuation is not the text-to-speech technology itself, but the shift towards voice conversational agents for businesses. The ElevenAgents platform already handles over 15 million conversations per week, three times more than in February, and its ARR (annual recurring revenue) has more than tripled in that same period, according to data released by the company in connection with the tender.
The macro numbers the company is handling today place its ARR at around $600 million, as Staniszewski stated at the Nrth conference in Toronto. At the end of 2025, the figure was $350 million; in May, it was $500 million. 55% of revenues now come from corporate clients, compared to approximately 40% a year earlier. The company claims its technology operates in the daily operations of 5 of the 10 largest tech companies in the world, although it does not specify which ones.
The mix of investors in the tender includes sovereign funds such as GIC (Singapore) and OTPP (Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan), global managers like Wellington and T. Rowe Price, investment banking firms like Goldman Sachs, and European private equity like EQT. For the founders, this type of late-stage institutional capital is often a sign that the company is preparing for a potential IPO. In fact, Staniszewski stated at the Nrth conference that ElevenLabs is "preparing to have that option" for an IPO in the coming years, although he did not confirm that it would happen in 2028.
The company's liquidity calendar shows a clear pattern: in September 2025, it organized a $100 million tender at a valuation of $6.6 billion; in May 2026, another $100 million tender alongside the additional closure of Series D. Now, with a valuation of $22 billion, the company prefers to provide regular liquidity to its employees without going public.
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