ElevenLabs crosses $500M ARR in four months of 2026, closes Series D with BlackRock, NVIDIA, and Wellington Management

ElevenLabs announced on May 5, 2026 that it has surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue — reached in the first four months of the year — and closed a Series D funding round with a group of institutional and strategic investors.

What's new

ElevenLabs ended 2025 at $350 million in ARR and reached $500 million within the first four months of 2026, representing roughly 43% growth in that window alone. The company did not disclose the exact Series D size but confirmed a $100 million tender offer was completed alongside the round to provide liquidity for early shareholders and employees.

Investors in the Series D include:

• Institutional: BlackRock, Wellington Management, D.E. Shaw, Schroders
• Strategic: NVIDIA (via NVentures), Salesforce, Santander, KPN, Deutsche Telekom (via T.Capital)
• Creative: Over 30 individuals including Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and South Korean filmmaker Hwang Dong-hyuk

Valuation was not disclosed.

Context

ElevenLabs launched as a voice cloning and text-to-speech API, and has since expanded significantly. The platform now covers AI voice generation, voice agents for customer support and sales workflows, a dubbing product for professional localization (Dubbing v2, launched May 28), and a music generation product (Music v2, launched May 26 via ElevenMusic).

The NVIDIA strategic investment through NVentures aligns with compute demand for voice inference workloads. Salesforce's participation suggests potential enterprise distribution and CRM integration deals ahead. The creative investor group — which includes notable film and entertainment figures — points toward ElevenLabs' investment in the entertainment and media localization vertical.

ElevenLabs has also been expanding internationally: presence in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and Greece was announced in 2026, and in June the company signed a government MOU with the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Why it matters

The $500M ARR pace positions ElevenLabs as one of the fastest-growing infrastructure-layer AI companies by revenue. Voice AI is increasingly treated not as a feature but as a distinct modality — the primary interface for government services, customer support automation, accessibility tools, and entertainment localization. The caliber of investors entering at this stage (BlackRock, Wellington) reflects the sector being treated as a long-hold infrastructure bet, not a speculative growth round.

The $100M tender offer structure is a notable detail: at this revenue level, demand for employee and early investor liquidity is high enough to merit a structured secondary mechanism rather than waiting for an IPO.