ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski: How Voice Becomes the Interface for AI

Watch on YouTube ↗  |  May 06, 2026 at 15:24  |  26:16  |  Sequoia Capital
Speakers
Mati Staniszewski — Co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs

Summary

Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, explains how the company built a frontier audio AI business by focusing on an overlooked domain in 2022. He details the company's remote-first approach, early monetization, full audio model stack, and expansion of voice agents beyond customer support into sales, citizen support, education, and healthcare. He also highlights emotional intelligence and audio general intelligence as next frontiers and discusses moats in data annotation and ecosystem. Audience Q&A covers agent-to-agent negotiation, trust and authentication, and AI music.

  • ElevenLabs started in 2022 betting on audio AI when text and vision dominated.
  • The company monetized early and scaled to over $400M in revenue with just over 400 people.
  • Voice agents are expanding from support into sales, education, healthcare, and government services.
  • Emotional intelligence and audio general intelligence are seen as major upcoming step changes.
  • AI music can produce production music but not top-charts music yet, with change expected in one to two years.
  • Moats include data annotation, domain-specific production, and a large voice ecosystem.
  • Audience Q&A covers agent-to-agent negotiation, trust and authentication, and model training priorities.
Ideas
Mati Staniszewski Co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs 2:36
Overlooked audio AI becomes voice interface.
Mati believed audio was an overlooked domain in 2022, with few researchers and smaller models than text or vision, but with large annotation needs that ElevenLabs could solve. He expects voice to become the primary interface for agents, robots, and next-generation computing, making audio AI a major underappreciated opportunity. The full audio model stack spans text-to-speech, speech-to-text, dubbing, real-time voice agents, emotional intelligence, audio general intelligence, and music.
AI-SECTOR HIGH
Mati Staniszewski Co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs 4:33
Efficient frontier audio AI leader.
ElevenLabs has built a frontier audio AI business with just over 400 people and over $400M in revenue, adding more than $100M net new ARR in Q1. It monetized from day one, stayed healthy on margins, and assembled a remote team of top audio researchers. Its moats include data annotation with 1,000+ voice coaches and musicians, domain-specific production, an ecosystem of 20,000+ voices, and a continuous model quality advantage.
ElevenLabs HIGH
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This Sequoia Capital video, published May 06, 2026, features Mati Staniszewski discussing AI-SECTOR, ElevenLabs. 2 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.

Speakers: Mati Staniszewski  · Tickers: AI-SECTOR, ElevenLabs