Voice AI company ElevenLabs plans to expand its services to all 22 official Indian languages over the next year as it strengthens its presence in India, which it considers its largest market outside the US.
The company currently offers speech-to-text and text-to-speech services in 14 Indian languages. ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski said the company wants AI interactions to become as natural as human conversations, allowing people to use AI in their own languages and dialects.
Speaking at the company’s first India Summit in Bengaluru, Staniszewski said the future of AI adoption will depend on how naturally the technology can interact with people. He said AI must not only sound human but also understand context, respond naturally, follow safety rules and act on user intent.
ElevenLabs is currently valued at around $22 billion, about twice its valuation at the beginning of the year. The company is backed by major investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Sequoia Capital.
India is expected to be a major growth market for voice AI because of its large population, widespread use of regional languages and hundreds of millions of people who still use feature phones. More than 100 languages are actively spoken across the country.
Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairman of Infosys and architect of Aadhaar, has described voice AI as a key technology for achieving greater digital inclusion in India.
ElevenLabs currently works with more than 250 businesses and enterprises in India, including Razorpay, TVS Motor and Urban Company. Indian businesses have recorded more than 100 million conversations through ElevenAgents over the past year, with over 70 per cent of these conversations taking place in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.
Globally, ElevenLabs has crossed a $600 million revenue run rate and is on track to have 100 employees in India.
The company has also entered into a partnership with the Karnataka government to explore the use of Kannada voice AI in areas such as skill development, citizen services and grievance redressal. The partnership will also cover responsible AI and voice restoration.
Staniszewski and Karnataka Information Technology and Biotechnology Minister Priyank Kharge formalised the partnership through a memorandum of understanding with the Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society (KITS), marking ElevenLabs’ first partnership with an Indian state government.
The wider voice AI sector is also attracting significant investment globally. According to Tracxn data, there were 153 companies operating in the voice AI sector worldwide, with 107 funded companies collectively raising $3.6 billion in venture capital and private equity through August this year.
