Poland's government takes a stake in ElevenLabs, co-founding AI Lab Poland with LOT Airlines, InPost, and Warsaw University

The Government of Poland has become an investor in ElevenLabs, the voice AI company, through Vinci, an investment vehicle that is part of the state-owned BGK Group. The move makes Poland the first national government to hold equity in ElevenLabs and coincides with the launch of AI Lab Poland, a joint initiative designed to support the next generation of Polish AI companies.

What's new

ElevenLabs announced the investment on June 18, 2026, framing it as both a financial and strategic partnership. "Through Vinci, part of the BGK Group, Poland joins Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and ICONIQ as one of our investors," the company wrote on its blog.

Alongside the equity stake, ElevenLabs and the Polish government are co-founding AI Lab Poland, described as combining "capital, technology, science, and talent in one place." The initiative's founding partners include Centrum e-Zdrowia (Poland's digital health agency), LOT Polish Airlines, InPost (the logistics company), and Uniwersytet Warszawski (the University of Warsaw). The Lab's stated objective is helping Polish AI startups grow with global ambition from an early stage.

ElevenLabs co-founders Mati and Piotr Dąbkowski, who first met as teenagers in Warsaw, are ElevenLabs' Polish-born leadership. The company framed the partnership as strengthening "the connection between Poland, Europe, and the broader global technology ecosystem."

Context

ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 and has grown into one of the leading voice synthesis and text-to-speech platforms, used extensively in content creation, accessibility tools, and enterprise voice agent deployments. The company raised a Series C at a $3.3 billion valuation in early 2025 led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Sequoia and ICONIQ participating — the same investors now joined by Vinci.

Poland has been positioning itself as a European AI hub. Warsaw's tech scene has grown substantially over the past decade, with deep engineering talent pools that have attracted major technology companies to open offices. The Polish government has been exploring AI investment policy through BGK, the national development bank, as part of a broader effort to keep domestic AI companies from relocating to the US or Western Europe as they scale.

ElevenLabs also announced a partnership with the UK government in early June 2026, bringing voice AI to public services — a pattern suggesting the company is actively cultivating government relationships as a growth vector.

Why it matters

"Europe is at a critical moment," ElevenLabs wrote in its announcement, and the Poland investment illustrates one response to that moment: governments taking direct equity positions in AI companies rather than relying solely on regulation and grant programs to shape the sector.

For ElevenLabs, the partnership adds a state-backed institutional investor and opens channels to public-sector deployments across healthcare, aviation, and logistics through the AI Lab Poland founding partners. These verticals — and Poland's 38 million residents — represent a meaningful enterprise expansion opportunity.

The broader signal is that European governments are moving toward active participation in AI company ownership, not just oversight. Whether this model of government-as-investor accelerates or complicates AI development in Europe will depend on how much operational independence companies like ElevenLabs retain — but the trend is new and worth watching.