ElevenLabs was co-founded in 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski, an ex-Google machine learning engineer and Mati Staniszewski, an ex-Palantir deployment strategist.

The startup's specialization in AI voice intelligence, a still-emerging field in Europe, played a significant role in attracting investors.

[3][7] The funding round was co-led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and entrepreneur Daniel Gross.

Additionally, the company announced a series of new products, including their Voice Marketplace, AI Dubbing Studio, and mobile app.

[10] It uses advanced algorithms to analyze the contextual aspects of text, aiming to detect emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, or alarm, which enables the system to understand the user's sentiment,[11] resulting in achieving a more realistic and human-like inflection.

[14] In July 2023, ElevenLabs announced "Projects", a tool for creating long-form spoken content such as audiobooks and dialogue segments with contextually-aware synthetic or custom voices.

Using an in-house AI model, it automatically detects languages like Korean, Dutch, and Vietnamese, allowing for "emotionally rich" multilingual speech generation.

[21] Following its launch in January 2023, ElevenLabs gained rapid momentum and was commended for its voice output quality, fast generation times, and a "generous free tier".

[5] The company has subsequently limited access to its voice cloning feature to paid subscribers,[31] citing the requirement to provide payment information as means for improving accountability,[32] and has implemented bans on users who repeatedly violate the terms of service.

The New Hampshire attorney general's office launched an investigation into the incident and linked it to a company based in Texas, with audio experts concluding the call was made using ElevenLabs.