Lawrence Jengar
Mar 06, 2026 12:36
ElevenLabs releases Eleven Multilingual v1 supporting seven languages as the AI voice startup eyes potential IPO following $500M Series D round.
ElevenLabs has unveiled Eleven Multilingual v1, a speech synthesis model adding French, German, Hindi, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish to its AI voice platform. The release comes weeks after the company closed a $500 million Series D round at an $11 billion valuation, positioning the London-headquartered startup for a potential IPO.
The new model builds on ElevenLabs’ existing monolingual technology but incorporates multilingual training data to maintain emotional delivery and context awareness across all supported languages. A key technical feature: the system can identify and properly articulate multilingual text within a single prompt while preserving each speaker’s voice characteristics.
Technical Capabilities and Limitations
The model integrates with ElevenLabs’ VoiceLab features including Instant Voice Cloning and Voice Design. Cloned voices should retain their original speech characteristics—including accents—when generating content in any supported language.
There are known issues. Numbers, acronyms, and foreign words sometimes default to English pronunciation when the prompt is in another language. The company recommends spelling out numbers and acronyms in the target language as a workaround while improvements are developed.
Business Context
This multilingual expansion arrives at a pivotal moment for ElevenLabs. The company reported over $330 million in annual recurring revenue for 2025, up dramatically from its early days when it hit one million registered users within months of its January 2023 beta launch. Total funding now stands at $781 million following the February 2026 Series D.
The 400-employee company, co-founded by ex-Google ML engineer Piotr Dąbkowski and former Palantir strategist Mati Staniszewski, has grown from a $100 million valuation in June 2023 to $11 billion in under three years.
Market Implications
For the AI voice market, this release intensifies competition in multilingual synthesis. Game developers, content localization services, and educational platforms now have access to emotionally nuanced voice generation across major world languages without requiring separate voice actors for each market.
The model is available across all ElevenLabs subscription tiers through a dropdown menu in the Speech Synthesis panel. With IPO speculation heating up and ARR exceeding $330 million, investors watching the AI infrastructure space should note ElevenLabs’ aggressive product expansion as it builds toward a potential public listing.
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