ElevenLabs, a voice artificial intelligence (AI) company, plans to grow its engineering team in India tenfold and open an India office by the end of the year, The Hindu BusinessLine reported.
The company calls India its second-largest market outside the United States. It works with more than 250 businesses there, in banking and financial services, financial technology, consumer technology and education technology.
Businesses in India ran 100 million conversations on ElevenAgents over the past year, and more than 70% of them were in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. More than 25,000 developers and businesses in India build on the company’s application programming interface each month, up roughly two and a half times from a year earlier.
“We’ve tripled our book of business since the start of this year,” said Karthik Rajaram, the company’s general manager for India. He said the company wants to reach $100 million in revenue in the country. Customers have moved from testing voice AI to running it in production, he said, and ElevenLabs is raising its spending on talent, data residency and engineering to go after regulated industries and larger accounts.
The company’s own value has grown quickly. It recently closed a $300 million employee tender offer that values it at $22 billion, double its valuation in February.
A first state partnership
ElevenLabs held its first India Summit on Tuesday in Bengaluru, in southern India, and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society. It is the company’s first partnership with a state government in India.
The agreement covers three areas: a safety framework for voice AI, which includes deepfake detection, audio watermarking and consent rules for voice cloning; voice restoration for people who have lost the ability to speak; and voice AI in Kannada for skilling, citizen services and grievance redressal. Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs co-founder and chief executive, and Priyank Kharge, Karnataka’s minister for information technology and biotechnology, formalized the agreement. According to media reports, ElevenLabs will also give free lifetime licenses to citizens and organizations the state identifies.
Nihal Chauhan, who works on public sector partnerships for the Asia-Pacific region, said the company wants more agreements like this with ministries at the central and state level.
Why it matters
The platform now supports fourteen languages spoken in India and plans to cover all twenty-two official languages. For American companies weighing India, the figures show a market where voice products already run in production, mostly in languages other than English.
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