Activate, a fund that focuses on AI, has really bet on India’s future where people use their voices with technology. They invested in ElevenLabs at a $11 billion valuation during its Series D funding round. This investment, made through a different part of Activate, is responding to the increasing need for AI that understands and speaks many languages and has conversations, and India is already a very important place for ElevenLabs’ income and how many people are using it.
Why Activate is betting on voice in India
Indian businesses are putting money into AI that’s led by voice, creating tools in local languages for customer service, buying and selling things, learning, and making content. Activate believes the way people use technology is changing to be voice based, and they want to be a main part of that change by partnering with a worldwide company that provides the voice technology.
Aakrit Vaish, who founded Activate, says that voice will be a basic way to use AI in India. He adds that because India has so many different languages, ElevenLabs provides excellent technology that Indian business founders can use to create potentially large, voice-based AI companies.
ElevenLabs says India is already their second largest market in the world when it comes to money coming in, and co-founder Mati Staniszewski says India is one of the quickest countries to start using voice AI. He points to the interesting ways people are starting to use it in India.
Deal structure and investors
Activate hasn’t said how much money they invested. They do emphasize that the money came from a special investment section that looks at later-stage AI companies around the world that have a connection to India, and not from their usual fund for very new companies.
ICONIQ Capital and Andreessen Horowitz led the Series D funding. And in the last week, ElevenLabs has also gotten investment from Nvidia and BlackRock, which shows how much interest there is in voice AI platforms.
Activate says this is their first investment in a worldwide AI company that’s already growing, since their $75 million AI fund was started last year. This deal is also the first time they’ve invested in a growing company through this separate investment section, again showing they have two different strategies for AI.
India go-to-market plan
Activate will be ElevenLabs’ partner in India, working on the ground. They will not only introduce ElevenLabs to businesses, but also work with startups, programmers and large companies that are building on ElevenLabs’ platform. Their goal is to make it used in business more quickly and encourage new developments in India.
Activate says early stage startups in India will have special, easier access to ElevenLabs’ voice technology. This partnership is meant to make it faster to get things working, improve how products are adapted for the local market and speed up the process of testing an idea and then actually using it.
Here is what the partnership sets out to do:
– Expand ElevenLabs’ enterprise reach in India
– Enable preferential access for early-stage founders
– Support developers building multilingual voice products
What ElevenLabs brings
ElevenLabs, which was founded in 2022, creates AI models for making speech, doing dubbing (changing the language of a video) and making conversational voice assistants. The services they offer fit with what India needs – accurate, easily expanded, and local-language experiences in all the ways customers connect with a business.
The success ElevenLabs is having in India is part of a larger trend. As conversational interfaces move from being tested to being actually used, platforms that are good quality, quick and cover a lot of languages are becoming more popular. Activate wants to be in charge of this development with a partner who is already leading in income in India.
The strategic signal
The $11 billion valuation from Series D puts ElevenLabs in the group of voice AI platforms that people are watching most closely. For founders and businesses deciding what technology to use, it means ElevenLabs has a lot of support in the industry, has strong finances and will likely focus on supporting many languages.
For Activate, the fact that they’re using this separate investment section is just as important as the amount of money they invested. It lets them invest in leading global AI companies that are powering the technology used in India, while their main fund continues to support brand new, AI-focused startups that are building new things on top of that existing technology.
Staniszewski says the momentum is happening now. What happens next depends on getting more involved in the AI environment, and both ElevenLabs and Activate are preparing to make India the place to prove voice-first AI can work on a large scale.
