Mati Staniszewski

Mati Staniszewski has helped turn synthetic speech from a narrow production tool into infrastructure for media, accessibility and conversational agents. ElevenLabs’ growth in 2025–2026 demonstrates international demand for expressive audio, while the same realism makes consent, traceability and fraud prevention inseparable from its success.

Mati Staniszewski grew up in Poland and studied mathematics at Imperial College London. He later worked on technology deployments before co-founding ElevenLabs with Piotr Dąbkowski in 2022. Staniszewski leads the company commercially; Dąbkowski and the research organisation hold substantial responsibility for its underlying technical work. The company began with expressive text-to-speech and voice cloning, then expanded into dubbing, speech recognition, sound generation and conversational agents. In January 2025, it raised US$180 million at a US$3.3 billion valuation. It also reported that its impact programme had worked with 80 organisations and helped more than 1,000 people with speech impairments restore personalised voices. These are company disclosures, but they demonstrate an application extending beyond entertainment and customer service. By May 2026, the company said it had surpassed US$500 million in annual recurring revenue after ending 2025 at US$350 million. The acceleration is notable but not audited public-company reporting. The central tension in Staniszewski’s work is equally clear. High-fidelity synthetic speech can localise culture and restore voices; it can also enable fraud and impersonation. In 2025 he described safeguards including provenance, text and voice moderation, account traceability and an audio classifier. Their effectiveness at global scale remains a continuing test.