News
VC bet on $3 billion AI firm ElevenLabs after one meeting with founder
Carles Reina, GTM manager at Eleven Labs, shared why he invested in AI company.
Eleven Labs
The angel investor who backed a billion-dollar AI startup when it was still in its infancy said he decided to invest in the company after just 30 minutes of 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 its January Series C funding round earlier this year, the company raised $180 million at a valuation of $3.3 billion.
Then in September, the company announced it was letting employees sell shares at a $6.6 billion valuation.
However, before Eleven Labs even had a concrete product, Reina, who was working at Palantir Technologies at the time, decided to take a chance on the firm after meeting Staniszewski.
“I met Mati when he was still at Palantir,” Reina told CNBC Make It in an interview. “We started talking, and within 30 minutes of the first conversation, I told him, ‘How much money do you want?’”
Reina explained that before the launch of ChatGPT, voice AI hadn’t garnered much attention because big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all had text-to-speech products, but they hadn’t really taken off.
“With ElevenLabs no one was looking at voice AI, literally no one wanted to give [them] money. No VCs wanted to actually back ElevenLabs, back in the early days on the pre-seed round. So those are the type of industries that I really like, so that I can get in before everyone else,” he said.
Reina has made 74 angel investments over the past eight years, including Revolut, Volumetric, Elroy Air, and Speckle. He now works for Eleven Labs as a go-to-market manager.
He said he always tries to identify industries that other investors are not paying attention to: “I’ve done [invested in] mostly AI before it was sexy. I’ve done robotics before it was sexy as well.”
The No.1 trait to watch for in founders
Reina specializes in investing in pre-seed companies — those with an idea, but often without a fully developed product. This means identifying key traits in founders that indicate a startup will succeed.
“If there is a product, fantastic, but if there is no product, absolutely fine for me … I love founders that are very technical. They’re super sharp, very smart, 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’ll have a deeper understanding of the product and the market they’re selling to.
Reina said he saw these traits in Staniszewksi, which convinced him to back ElevenLabs despite the voice AI market being very small at the time.
“No one wants to talk to AI voices if they sound robotic. That’s fundamentally the biggest problem that there was right… so when I spoke with Mati, he talked about both elements, and he had not been in the market,” Reina said.
“It was really interesting to see he was thinking about the problems of the entire ecosystem before even actually having any product or before even actually talking to any real potential customer.”
Staniszewski had a background in mathematics with a first-class honors degree from Imperial College London. His vision and technical expertise sold Reina, and ElevenLabs became one of the few startups that he decided to back “literally within less than an hour.”
Now, Eleven Labs is planning a global expansion, including building new hubs in Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico, as well as getting the company ready for IPO within the next five years, Staniszewski told CNBC in July.
