BlackRock, Jamie Foxx and Eva Longoria Just Bet Big on ElevenLabs Voice AI
ElevenLabs voice AI just got a whole lot more star-studded. The company has revealed the full list of investors behind its $500 million Series D round, first announced in February, and the lineup is turning heads across both Wall Street and Hollywood.
Joining the round are financial giants BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, and Schroders, alongside major enterprises including NVIDIA, Salesforce, Santander, KPN, and Deutsche Telekom. On the celebrity side, actor Jamie Foxx, actress and producer Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk have all backed the company, according to a blog post from ElevenLabs.
The announcement came alongside a major revenue milestone. ElevenLabs voice AI has now crossed $500 million in Annual Recurring Revenue, a significant leap from the nearly $350 million ARR it closed last year. CEO and co-founder Mati Staniszewski noted that the company added $100 million in net new ARR in Q1 2026 alone, ending that quarter at around $450 million.
The company’s valuation has also climbed sharply, rising from $6.6 billion last September to $11 billion in February, a pace that signals just how fast appetite for voice AI infrastructure is growing.
Enterprise adoption is clearly accelerating. In the past quarter, ElevenLabs signed major contracts with Deutsche Telekom, Revolut, and Klarna. Karine Peters, Managing Director at Deutsche Telekom’s venture arm T. Capital, described ElevenLabs as “a foundational enabler” of the company’s broader Industrial AI strategy, pointing to voice-as-a-service and multilingual automation as key areas of collaboration.
Beyond institutional backing, the company also closed a $100 million tender offer, its second in roughly six months. Staniszewski revealed that retail investors will soon get a chance to participate through Robinhood Ventures, though details of that program are yet to come.
Staniszewski has been vocal about what makes ElevenLabs voice AI stand apart. He argues that people will not trust systems that sound robotic, making the push toward genuinely human-level AI voice models not just a product goal but a business necessity. To deepen that research capability, the company recently acquired the team from Polish voice AI startup Papla.
With A-list names on the cap table and $500 million in ARR in the bank, ElevenLabs is making a very loud statement about where the future of human-computer interaction is headed.
