Credit: Murf
Bangalore-based Murf AI is releasing its Falcon 2 voice model on 20 August at $0.01 per generated minute, a fifth of what ElevenLabs charges. The company says it scores above some OpenAI models on the independent Artificial Analysis leaderboard.
A Bangalore company is selling synthetic speech at a fifth of what Europe’s biggest voice AI startup charges. Murf AI makes its Falcon 2 model public on 20 August, priced at $0.01 for every generated minute.
At volume that is the entire argument. A million minutes of speech costs $10,000 on Falcon 2, against $50,000 on ElevenLabs Turbo and Flash.
The performance claim is what makes the price interesting. Murf says Falcon 2 scores above some OpenAI entries, including its Realtime API, on the independent Artificial Analysis leaderboard, and responds in under 100 milliseconds.
That claim deserves a beat of patience. The model is not publicly available until Thursday, and the comparison is a company pointing at a third-party leaderboard rather than anyone testing it in production.
It is also the second time in nine months. Murf launched the first Falcon in November 2025 with a press release saying it outperformed ElevenLabs at 55 millisecond latency.
The company behind it is not a weekend project. Founded in 2020 by three IIT Kharagpur engineers, backed by Matrix Partners and Elevation Capital, it claims 10 million users and 300 corporate customers including Cisco, Pfizer, Nestlé and Air France-KLM.
The reason this matters in Europe is who it is aimed at. ElevenLabs is the continent’s flagship AI company, in talks at a $22bn valuation and built on the argument that its voices are the best available.
Murf is competing on trust too, not only on cost. Chief operating officer Sneha Roy says the company works with real voice actors who consent to the use of their voices, with transparent contracts, ongoing royalties and data protection.
European institutions have already picked a side, with money. Poland took an $11mn stake in ElevenLabs, and the UK government signed an agreement to use its voice AI in public services.
The rest of Falcon 2 is enterprise plumbing. It offers data residency in 11 countries, deployment inside a customer’s own cloud, up to 10,000 concurrent calls, and training on live customer calls and booking flows rather than scripted narration.
Europe has been selling quality and trust while assuming price would follow. A model claiming comparable benchmarks at a fifth of the cost is the first serious test of that order.
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