ElevenLabs CEO Says a ‘Good Goal’ is to Start IPO Prep in 2028

Artificial intelligence voice startup ElevenLabs may start preparing for an initial public offering in 2028, Chief Executive Officer Mati Staniszewski said, taking advantage of a boom in AI agents for enterprise communications.

“We’d love to IPO, build a public company, build that step in a longer journey,” Staniszewski said at the Bloomberg Tech event in London on Tuesday. “IPO of course is not an end in itself. It’s a step in the journey.”

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 company recently closed a $300 million employee tender offer that valued the firm at $22 billion, doubling its valuation from this February. Staniszewski said there will be a general expectation that people are interacting with AI in a business context within three to five years,

“Today you assume that you’re interacting with a human unless it’s proven to be AI,” he said. “In the future I think it will be the opposite.”

Read More: Big Tech’s $750 Billion AI Bet Confronts Slowing Core Growth

While the proliferation of AI agents has helped boost productivity, fraud and deep fakes could stop clients from giving the technology agency.

The company recently launched a synthetic voice detection product, where it picks up traces in a live audio stream to determine whether caller is human or AI. The pitch is to help government agencies that aren’t equipped to handle a surge in volume from AI agents flooding their platforms.

Investors have poured money into AI companies developing models as well as the technology that underpins them. But concerns about a return on that investment have hit share prices, and companies are under pressure to demonstrate they can make money. They also face competition from a cluster of developers rapidly releasing open-weight models that offer near cutting-edge performance for a fraction of the price of existing models.

ElevenLabs faces competition from Alibaba’s open-sourced Qwen model, which has speech generation and voice cloning functions, as well as US companies such as Palo Alto-based Fish Audio.