ElevenLabs Hits $22 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO by 2028

Voice AI company ElevenLabs is valued at $22 billion after a $300 million employee tender offer in September — and its CEO says the firm could begin preparing for an IPO by 2028.

Co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski laid out the timeline at a Bloomberg Tech event in London, per PYMNTS. "We'd love to IPO, build a public company, build that step in a longer journey," Staniszewski said. "IPO, of course, is not an end in itself. It's a step in the journey."

The IPO plans come amid a boom in AI agents built for enterprise communications. Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs develops voice and audio models for a specific set of commercial uses: sales and call centers, audiobook narration, and ad translation.

The valuation math shows the pace of the AI market. A $300 million employee tender offer in September valued ElevenLabs at $22 billion. That figure doubled the company's valuation from February — seven months earlier.

What does the CEO expect in voice AI?

Staniszewski predicts a reversal in how people judge who, or what, is on the other end of a business conversation. Over the next three to five years, he said, people will come to expect they are interacting with AI in business scenarios.

"Today you assume that you're interacting with a human unless it's proven to be AI," Staniszewski said. "In the future, I think it will be the opposite."

That shift cuts both ways. AI agents have lifted productivity, PYMNTS reported. But concerns about fraud and deepfakes could stop clients from giving the technology too much leeway. An AI voice convincing enough to close a sale is also convincing enough to impersonate a customer.

How is ElevenLabs handling the deepfake risk?

The company has already built a defense product. In October, ElevenLabs debuted a synthetic voice detection tool. The tool picks up traces in a live audio stream and concludes whether the caller is human or AI.

The first target users are government agencies. The idea, per the report, is to help agencies that are not prepared to handle a flood of AI agents hitting their platforms — think unemployment lines and tax helplines fielding automated callers.

The move makes commercial sense for a firm whose core business is generating synthetic voices: selling the detector alongside the generator hedges the trust problem the generator creates.

Why does voice AI matter for B2B workflows?

Voice AI has moved from answering questions to taking action, PYMNTS reported in July. Competition now centers on a single question: can the AI do something useful after it grasps its instructions?

The current use cases are hands-busy workers. A warehouse supervisor can ask about inventory shortages while walking the floor. A field technician can diagnose equipment without stopping to type.

For B2B firms, the report frames the payoff as workflow compression: voice AI agents merge multiple corporate interactions into a single conversation.

The PYMNTS report offers a concrete example from finance:

"Consider accounts payable. Instead of navigating multiple ERP screens, a finance manager could simply ask, 'Which invoices are becoming high risk? Contact suppliers requesting payment extensions under $50,000 and prepare a liquidity summary for tomorrow's CFO meeting.'"

That single spoken command replaces a chain of ERP lookups, supplier emails and report drafting. The value lies not in the voice itself but in the actions the agent completes behind it.

What comes next?

Staniszewski's 2028 window puts the IPO preparation roughly three years out, matching his own forecast that AI interaction becomes the default business assumption within three to five years. If he is right, ElevenLabs would be listing into a market where enterprises no longer ask whether to deploy voice agents, only how to verify them — a market the company is already selling tools for on both sides.