VC bet on $3 billion AI firm ElevenLabs after one meeting with founder
Eleven Labs’ GTM manager Carles Reina shared why he invested in the artificial intelligence company.
Eleven Laboratories
The angel investor, who supports a billion-dollar artificial intelligence initiative that is still in its infancy, said that he decided to invest in the company just 30 minutes after meeting one of its founders.
Carles Reina first decided to invest in AI voice startup Eleven Labs in 2022, when he was a venture partner at pre-seed fund Concept Ventures.
Co-founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, Eleven Labs specializes in advanced text-to-speech and voice cloning technology. In the Series C financing round held in January earlier this year, the company raised $180 million at once. valued at $3.3 billion.
Then in September, the company announced that it was allowing the sale of shares to its employees. $6.6 billion valuation.
But before Eleven Labs even had a concrete product, Reina, who was working at Palantir Technologies at the time, decided to give the company a chance after meeting Staniszewski.
“I met Mati when I was still at Palantir,” Reina told CNBC Make It in an interview. “We started talking and within 30 minutes of the first conversation I asked him, ‘How much money do you want?’ I said.”
Reina explained that before the launch of ChatGPT, voice AI had not received much attention because major tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all had text-to-speech products, but they were not yet fully successful.
“No one at ElevenLabs was looking at voice AI, literally no one wanted to give anything away [them] money. No VC was willing to back ElevenLabs in the early days of the pre-seed round. “So these are the types of industries that I really like, so I can get in before anyone else,” he said.
Reina has made 74 angel investments in the last eight years, including Revolut, Volumetric, Elroy Air and Speckle. He currently works as a go-to-market manager at Eleven Labs.
He said he always tries to identify sectors that other investors don’t pay attention to: “That’s what I did [invested in] mostly AI before being sexy. “I was doing robotics before I was sexy.”
The number 1 trait to consider in founders
Reina specializes in investing in pre-seed companies that have an idea but often do not have a fully developed product. This means identifying key characteristics in founders that indicate a startup will be successful.
“If there’s a product, great, but if there’s no product, I’m totally fine with it… I love founders who are very technical. They’re extremely smart, very smart, and they’re literally trying to build a global company from day one,” Reina explained.
He said he “invests based on thesis,” so if a founder is very technical, they will have a deeper understanding of the product and the market they are selling to.
Reina said he saw these traits in Staniszewksi, which convinced him to support ElevenLabs even though the voice AI market was very small at the time.
“No one wants to speak with AI voices if they sound robotic. That’s basically the biggest problem, right… so when I talked to Mati he mentioned both elements and he wasn’t in the market either,” Reina said.
“It was really interesting to see that he was thinking about the problems of the entire ecosystem before he even bought any product or actually talked to an actual potential customer.”
Staniszewski had a background in mathematics, including a first-class honors degree from Imperial College London. His vision and technical expertise sold Reina, and ElevenLabs became one of the few startups he decided to support “literally in less than an hour.”
Now Eleven Labs is planning a global expansion that includes setting up new headquarters in Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico, as well as preparing the company for an IPO within the next five years. Staniszewski told CNBC in July.
