Voice AI Startup ElevenLabs Hires OpenAI Executive to Oversee Revenue

ElevenLabs has hired former OpenAI executive Ashley Kramer as its first chief revenue officer, part of the startup’s efforts to drum up business demand for its artificial intelligence voice tools.

Kramer was formerly vice president of enterprise sales at OpenAI, and previously held roles at developer platform GitLab Inc., Oracle Corp. and NASA. She joins as the startup increasingly relies on businesses for sales rather than consumers. More than half of revenue came from enterprise customers this year, up from 40% last year, something Chief Executive Officer Mati Staniszewski described as an “inflection point.”

The firm said in July it crossed $600 million in annual recurring revenue and counts Meta Platforms Inc., Stripe LLC, Deustche Telekom AG and Revolut Ltd. as some of its customers. ARR is an annualized revenue measure commonly used by startups to demonstrate growth.

ElevenLabs, formed in 2022, makes voice and audio models that power AI agents for sales and call centers, narrate audiobooks and translate ads into different languages. The startup has held early discussions with investors to allow employees to sell shares in a transaction that would value the firm at roughly $22 billion, Bloomberg News previously reported.

Frontier AI companies are under pressure to demonstrate they can make money, since training and running models requires vast amounts of expensive computing power. They also face competition from a cluster of Chinese AI developers rapidly releasing models that offer near cutting-edge performance for a fraction of the price of Western models. Alibaba’s Qwen team open-sourced its Qwen3-TTS family, a series of speech generation models offering voice cloning and voice design this year. Fish Audio, another Chinese company, released the weights for its S2 speech model.

ElevenLabs and others charging more for access to their models are banking on enterprise customers wanting more than just cheap AI.

“To deliver value, we know that it takes more than bringing AI to the enterprise setting,” Staniszewski said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “It’s clear that companies are looking for a partner that can help them through the pipeline, from marketing to sales to customer support.”

The startup still trails general-purpose model makers by revenue run rate and valuation. Anthropic PBC, preparing for a blockbuster listing, told investors it was on track for annualized revenue to hit $65 billion, Bloomberg reported. OpenAI is on pace to generate annualized revenue of more than $40 billion based on its current performance, Bloomberg reported.

OpenAI has experienced an executive exodus in recent weeks, with chief revenue officer Denise Dresser, chief operating officer Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo, who oversaw much of the company’s core business, departing. Kramer said her decision predates recent executive turnover at OpenAI and was driven by a desire to join a “world-class team.”