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In week two of CS153 ("AI Coachella"), Anjney Midha interviews Mati Staniszewski, founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, tracing the company’s origins from an early Discord text-to-speech bot to a fast-growing frontier audio and speech platform.
Mati explains ElevenLabs’ initial focus on solving AI dubbing inspired by Poland’s single-voice film narration, the shift to prioritizing emotional, natural-sounding text-to-speech for creators, and the evolution from cascaded pipelines (transcription, translation/LLM, and speech generation) toward real-time voice agents.
They discuss tradeoffs between cascaded versus fused multimodal systems, efforts to detect and convey emotion, safety and voice authentication limits, on-device model deployment, collaboration with teams like Sesame, and business lessons on PLG plus enterprise deployment, team structure, pricing from customer value, and growth to over $430M revenue with ~450 employees.
Guest Speaker:
Mati Staniszewski is the CEO and co-founder of ElevenLabs, the AI voice/audio platform. Born in 1995 in a town outside Warsaw, Poland, he attended Copernicus Bilingual High School in Warsaw before earning a degree in mathematics from Imperial College London. While at Imperial, he organized Mathscon, a UK student-led mathematics conference. His earlier career included roles at Opera Software, BlackRock (where he worked in the Portfolio Analytics Group and helped launch the Aladdin Wealth platform), and Palantir Technologies (as a Deployment Strategist managing large-scale public- and private-sector implementations). In 2022, he co-founded ElevenLabs with his high school friend Piotr Dabkowski. He has raised hundreds of millions from investors, including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Salesforce Ventures, with the company valued at $11 billion as of February 2026. He joined the board of Klarna in 2025 and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in 2024 and TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025.
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