Two High School Friends From Poland
Taught AI To Laugh — And Built An $11 Billion Company

Mati Staniszewski's Childhood: From A Small Polish Town To Warsaw

Mati Staniszewski was born in 1995, in a small town outside Warsaw, Poland. He later moved into the city itself to attend high school, enrolling at Copernicus Bilingual High School.

It was there that he met Piotr Dabkowski, a classmate born in December 1994, at the same school — known there as Mikołaj Kopernik High School. The two became close friends as teenagers, sharing a fascination with technology that neither of them yet knew would eventually turn into a multi-billion dollar company.

Before ElevenLabs: Mati Staniszewski's Path Through BlackRock And Palantir

After high school, Staniszewski moved to London to study mathematics at Imperial College. While still a student, he got his first taste of building something from scratch, organizing Mathscon — a student-led math conference focused on making mathematics fun outside the usual university curriculum.

His early career took him through some of the world's most demanding employers: Opera Software, then BlackRock, where he joined the Portfolio Analytics Group and helped launch the Aladdin Wealth platform, and finally Palantir Technologies, working as a Deployment Strategist helping governments and large enterprises roll out new technology.

Piotr Dabkowski, meanwhile, followed his own rigorous path — studying engineering at Oxford, then earning a Master of Philosophy at Cambridge in 2017, where his thesis on AI-based image detection was published at NeurIPS, one of the most respected machine learning conferences in the world. He went on to work as a software engineer at Opera Software, Google, and Tessian.

The Bad Movie Dubbing That Sparked The Idea For ElevenLabs

The idea behind ElevenLabs didn't come from a grand strategic plan — it came from irritation. Staniszewski had long been frustrated by the poor quality of movie dubbing and voiceovers he'd grown up with in Poland, where foreign films are often dubbed by a small number of voice actors rather than fully re-cast.

Both Staniszewski and Dabkowski also shared a simpler complaint: they thought voice assistants like Siri and Alexa sounded obviously robotic, even years into their existence. While still holding down their day jobs — Mati at Palantir, Piotr at Google — the two began experimenting with AI voice technology as a weekend project.

Founding ElevenLabs: Mati Staniszewski And Piotr Dabkowski Quit Palantir And Google

In 2022, the weekend project became a real company. Staniszewski and Dabkowski pooled their personal savings, quit their jobs, and committed to ElevenLabs full-time. There were no fancy titles or org charts at first — but in practice, Staniszewski took on the CEO role, while Dabkowski led research and technology.

Rather than rushing a product to market, the earliest version of ElevenLabs operated almost like a research lab: a small, remote team trying to build genuinely human-sounding text-to-speech technology from first principles, instead of adapting older, more robotic-sounding systems.

The AI Voice That Started Adding "Umms" And Laughter On Its Own

Most people trying to build cleaner, more polished AI speech would consider hesitations, pauses, and stray sounds a bug to be removed. The ElevenLabs team read it completely differently.

When their early model began naturally reproducing the small imperfections of real human speech — including laughter — without being explicitly told to, the team took it as proof they were on the right track. Ironically, teaching an AI to sound a little less than perfect was exactly what made it sound convincingly real.

ElevenLabs' 2023 Launch: A Voice Platform, With A Deepfake Detector Built In

In 2023, ElevenLabs launched Speech Synthesis, a simple web-based text-to-speech platform aimed at content creators making narrated videos and publishers wanting to turn written articles into audio. It quickly found an audience among people producing large volumes of spoken content without hiring voice actors for every project.

Aware of how easily realistic AI voice technology could be misused for scams or disinformation, ElevenLabs paired an early $19 million funding raise in June 2023 with the launch of a voice detection tool — designed to help identify AI-generated speech, including content made with its own technology.

ElevenLabs' Valuation: From Unicorn To $11 Billion In Two Years

ElevenLabs' growth in valuation has been extraordinarily fast, even by AI industry standards. In January 2024, the company raised an $80 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, officially making it a unicorn.

From there, the numbers kept climbing: past $3.3 billion in mid-2025, then $6.6 billion by October 2025, and finally to roughly $11 billion in February 2026 — a round backed in part by Nvidia, and reportedly raised with an eye toward a future IPO. Both Staniszewski and Dabkowski each retain an estimated 15% ownership stake in the company, making both of them billionaires on paper.

ElevenLabs' Customers: The Atlantic, Washington Post, And 60% Of The Fortune 500

ElevenLabs' technology moved quickly from novelty to genuine enterprise infrastructure. The company struck partnerships with major publishers including The Atlantic and The Washington Post, along with large content producers like TheSoul Publishing, known for its "5-Minute Crafts" videos.

By 2025, employees at more than 60% of Fortune 500 companies were reportedly using ElevenLabs in some form, and users across the platform had collectively generated more than 100 years' worth of audio content since launch.

ElevenLabs In 2026: Music, Government Contracts, And $500M In Revenue

ElevenLabs has steadily expanded well beyond simple text-to-speech. The company launched Music v2 for AI-generated music and Dubbing v2 for improved multilingual video translation, and rolled out ElevenLabs for Government, reflecting rising demand from public-sector organizations for secure voice AI tools — including a partnership with the UK Government to bring voice AI into public services.

By May 2026, ElevenLabs announced it had surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue — a striking figure for a company founded just four years earlier by two friends experimenting with AI voice technology on weekends, without a physical office or a large founding team.

Mati Staniszewski And ElevenLabs: The Full Timeline, Year By Year

Five Business Lessons From Mati Staniszewski And The ElevenLabs Story

• Everyday annoyance can be a legitimate business insight

  Frustration with bad movie dubbing in Poland turned into the founding insight behind a multi-billion dollar AI voice company.

• A childhood friendship can be a genuine co-founder advantage

  Staniszewski and Dabkowski's decades-long friendship gave them a foundation of trust that let them make big, risky decisions — like quitting stable jobs at Palantir and Google — together.

• Spend real time in research before rushing to launch

  Roughly six months of pure research, with no customer-facing product yet, gave ElevenLabs a technical foundation strong enough to stand out in a crowded AI voice market.

• Sometimes the "flaw" is the feature

  Instead of removing the small imperfections their AI voice model produced, the team recognized that pauses, hesitations, and laughter were exactly what made the voices sound human.

• Build in responsibility before regulators or critics force you to

  Releasing a deepfake detection tool alongside their public launch showed foresight about how the technology could be misused — before it became a forced response to a scandal.

Frequently Asked Questions About Mati Staniszewski And ElevenLabs