ElevenLabs in talks for tender offer at $22bn valuation, doubling February mark

The voice AI startup is reportedly weighing a staff share sale that would value it at nearly double its February funding round, according to people familiar with the discussions.

ElevenLabs is in early talks with investors about an employee tender offer that would value the voice AI startup at roughly $22 billion, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter.

The figure would roughly double the $11 billion valuation the company reached five months ago, when it closed a $500 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital.

The discussions are described as preliminary and the terms could still change. A tender offer would let ElevenLabs employees sell shares to outside investors, a mechanism that has become increasingly common among AI startups racing to retain talent without forcing a full public listing.

The tender is expected to take place by September, and the pattern behind it is now familiar. ElevenLabs ran its first staff share sale in September 2025 at a $6.6 billion valuation, itself more than double the $3.3 billion mark set by its Series C round in January 2025.

If the new offer prices as reported, the company will have gone from $3.3 billion to roughly $22 billion in about eighteen months, a run that outpaces most of the AI sector it competes in.

Founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski and chief executive Mati Staniszewski, the London based company builds tools that turn text into speech and clone voices for dubbing, audiobooks and conversational agents.

Investors in the February round included BlackRock, Nvidia, a16z and Iconiq Growth, and TechCrunch’s reporting on that raise noted the company closed 2025 with about $330 million in annual recurring revenue.

Staniszewski has said the company took five months to move from $200 million to $300 million in ARR, a pace that has kept investors circling.

Voice AI has drawn heavy capital and heavier competition. Rival Deepgram raised $130 million at a $1.3 billion valuation in January, and Google has been deepening its own cloud partnership with ElevenLabs while also poaching talent from smaller voice labs elsewhere in the field.

ElevenLabs has also picked up government interest beyond its investor base, including a memorandum of understanding with the UK government covering public service accessibility and AI safety research, and an $11 million stake taken by Poland’s state investment fund last month.

The rationale for choosing a tender over a fresh primary round is mostly mechanical.

A secondary sale hands liquidity to existing shareholders, chiefly staff, rather than putting new capital on the balance sheet, and it lets a private company set an updated valuation marker without the dilution or disclosure obligations that come with raising fresh equity.

In a market where AI researchers and engineers can move between employers for a better package within weeks, it is also a retention tool dressed up as a financing event, letting ElevenLabs put a number on paper for staff even while a public listing remains untested.

None of that answers the harder questions the reporting leaves open. Bloomberg’s sources did not identify which investors would buy into the secondary sale, how much stock employees would be permitted to sell, or what revenue underpins the new number.

A tender offer sets a fresh valuation stamp without the disclosure obligations of a primary funding round, which means the $22 billion figure, if it holds, will arrive with considerably less scrutiny attached than the number itself implies.

What is clear is the direction of travel. ElevenLabs has now repriced itself upward three times in under two years, each time faster than the last, and each time through a mechanism that rewards staff without diluting existing shareholders.

Staniszewski said in March that the company aims to be ready for an IPO within two to three years, and a valuation stamp of this size, however preliminary, only sharpens the pressure to hit that timeline.

Whether $22 billion sticks by September depends on investors who have not yet been named, backing a valuation that has not yet been finalised, for a company that has given no sign of slowing down.