ElevenLabs CEO, state-of-the-art voice AI
Mati Staniszewski
Profile
Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, the voice AI company that took text-to-speech from robotic and unusable to genuinely indistinguishable from humans — and in doing so became the default plumbing for anyone shipping voice in an AI product. If you’ve used an AI audiobook, a voice agent, a dubbed YouTube video, or a podcast with a synthetic host in the last two years, there’s a strong chance ElevenLabs was underneath it.
Staniszewski grew up in Warsaw and studied mathematics at Imperial College London, then spent time at Palantir before starting ElevenLabs on January 1, 2022 with his childhood friend Piotr Dabkowski, an ex-Google ML engineer. The founding story is unusually concrete: both were Polish, both had grown up watching American films dubbed into Polish by a single monotone male narrator reading every role, and both thought this should be a solvable problem. They turned that into a research bet on contextual TTS — models that understand what a sentence means before deciding how to say it — and that bet held up as the world moved to agents, dubbing, and real-time voice.
The company’s trajectory has been absurd. ElevenLabs went from a research demo to powering voice for The New York Times, Disney-backed studios, and a long tail of indie developers. It raised from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and ICONIQ, and was valued at around $11B in early 2026. Staniszewski runs the company from London, stays technical, and has an obvious bias for shipping over theorizing — the kind of founder-CEO who still interviews every hire and still posts demos on launch day.
For developers, Staniszewski matters because ElevenLabs is the reference implementation for a category. When you’re deciding how to bolt a voice onto an agent, build a dubbing pipeline, or ship a voice-first product, ElevenLabs is the baseline everyone else gets measured against. Watching how he talks about the roadmap — voice agents, real-time conversational models, a creator marketplace — is a good way to see where consumer and developer voice AI is actually heading, not where the hype cycle is pointing.
Key Articles & Papers
ElevenLabs CEO: Voice Will Be the Core Interface for Tech TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025: Mati Staniszewski ElevenLabs' CEO Mati Staniszewski on tackling deepfakes ElevenLabs CEO & Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup ElevenLabs CEO: Why Voice Is the Next AI Interface Mati Staniszewski on the ElevenLabs blogControversies
The Biden deepfake robocall (January 2024). A political consultant used ElevenLabs to clone President Biden’s voice for robocalls in New Hampshire telling Democrats not to vote in the primary. Forensic analysis by Pindrop identified ElevenLabs as the source with 99% confidence. ElevenLabs banned the account and tightened its no-impersonation policy, and Staniszewski has been publicly active on deepfake detection and watermarking since — including partnering with third parties on provenance tooling. It’s the clearest real-world example of the dual-use tension that comes with shipping best-in-class voice cloning, and worth studying honestly if you’re building anything in this space. See Bloomberg’s reporting and Engadget’s follow-up.
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