# ElevenLabs Hit $500M Revenue While Jamie Foxx and BlackRock Threw $550M More At Them **URL:** \ **Category:** News & Articles\ **Tags:** hacking, earn-money, tips-tricks, ai, news\ **Created:** [May 17, 2026, 2:54pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/elevenlabs-hit-500m-revenue-while-jamie-foxx-and-blackrock-threw-550m-more-at-them/322107 "2026-05-17T14:54:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![TheStrength](https://onehack.st/user_avatar/onehack.st/thestrength/32/46753_2.png) [@TheStrength](https://onehack.st/u/TheStrength)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2026, 2:54pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/elevenlabs-hit-500m-revenue-while-jamie-foxx-and-blackrock-threw-550m-more-at-them/322107/1 "2026-05-17T14:54:42Z")
# 🎙 ElevenLabs Hit $500M Revenue While Jamie Foxx and BlackRock Threw $550M More At Them _The AI voice cloning company is now worth $11 billion — and Congress is sending them angry letters at the same time_ **$500 million in yearly revenue. $11 billion valuation. $100 million in NEW revenue just in Q1 2026 alone. And seven journalists are suing them.** WAIT. So the company that lets anyone clone a voice from a few seconds of audio just got backed by the world’s largest asset manager (BlackRock manages $11.5 TRILLION), the guy from Django Unchained, the Squid Game creator, and NVIDIA — all while a U.S. Senator is publicly asking them “hey, are you helping scammers steal from grandmas?” The answer to that question is… complicated. But the money doesn’t care. ![Voice AI](https://media.giphy.com/media/l4FGnnlIQslHkOPaU/giphy.gif) * * * > **🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary** > > | Term | What it actually means | > | --- | --- | > | ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) | How much money they make per year from subscriptions — not one-time sales | > | Series D | Their 4th big fundraising round — means they’ve been raising money 4 times now, getting bigger each time | > | Voice Cloning | Upload 30 seconds of someone talking → the AI can now say ANYTHING in their voice | > | Tender Offer | When employees get to sell their shares for cash without waiting for the company to go public | > | Deepfake | Fake audio/video made by AI that sounds/looks real enough to fool people | > | Watermarking | Hiding invisible data inside AI audio so you can later prove it was generated, not real | > **📈 The Receipts — Revenue Growth** > > - End of 2025: ~$350 million ARR > - Q1 2026 alone: added $100 million in net new revenue > - Current: $500 million+ ARR > - That’s a growth rate of roughly **43% in one quarter** > - For context: Spotify took 10 years to hit $500M revenue. ElevenLabs did it in about 3 years. > > [Source: [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/05/elevenlabs-lists-blackrock-jamie-foxx-and-eva-longoria-as-new-investors/)] > **💰 Who Just Gave Them Money** > > **Institutional money (the suits):** > > - [BlackRock](https://www.blackrock.com/) — world’s biggest asset manager > - Wellington Management > - D.E. Shaw (quant hedge fund) > - Schroders > - NVIDIA > - Salesforce Ventures > - Deutsche Telekom, Santander, KPN > > **Celebrity money (the flex):** > > - Jamie Foxx (actor, musician, literal voice impressionist in real life) > - Eva Longoria (actress, producer) > - Hwang Dong-hyuk (the creator of Squid Game) > > **The math:** Series D = $550M+ raised. Valuation jumped from $6.6B (Sept 2025) → $11B (Feb 2026). Plus they just did a $100M tender offer so employees could cash out. > > [Source: [Digital Music News](https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/05/06/elevenlabs-investors-celebs-and-blackrock/)] > **⚠️ The Other Side — Lawsuits and Congress** > > While ElevenLabs is celebrating, here’s what’s happening simultaneously: > > - **Senator Hassan** sent formal letters to ElevenLabs demanding answers about how they stop scammers ([source](https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/2026/4/senator-hassan-presses-leading-ai-voice-cloning-companies-to-prevent-exploitation-by-scammers)) > - **Seven journalists** are [suing them in Illinois](https://sifted.eu/articles/elevenlabs-lawsuit-2026) saying ElevenLabs trained on their voices without consent > - **Consumer Reports** found NO technical mechanism to confirm speaker consent > - **1 in 4 adults** worldwide has encountered an AI voice scam > - **$893 million** lost to AI-related scams last year (FBI numbers) > - A voice clone needs only **3-10 seconds** of audio to sound convincing > > The tension: The same tech that makes $500M/year in legit business (audiobooks, dubbing, accessibility) is also the exact same tech used to call your mom pretending to be you and ask for bail money. > **🗣️ What ElevenLabs Actually Does** > > Their main products: > > - **Voice cloning** — upload audio, get a synthetic copy of that voice > - **Text-to-speech** — type words, get human-sounding narration > - **ElevenMusic** — AI music generation (competing with Suno) > - **Dubbing** — automatically translate and re-voice videos into other languages > - **Voice library** — marketplace where voice actors sell their cloned voices > > Who uses it legit: Audiobook publishers, game studios, corporate training departments, accessibility tools for people who’ve lost their voice, movie dubbing studios, podcasters. > > Who uses it sketchy: Scammers impersonating family members, political deepfakes, unauthorized voice clones of celebrities, fake kidnapping calls. > **🔥 Why This Matters More Than Another Funding Round** > > This isn’t just “company raises money” news. This is the moment where voice becomes a **commodity**. Here’s why: > > 1. **Voice is the last frontier of identity.** Your face can be covered. Your name can be changed. But your voice has been uniquely YOURS for your entire life. Not anymore. > > 2. **$11B valuation means this ISN’T going away.** This is now too big to ban, too profitable to regulate into oblivion. It’s here permanently. > > 3. **The investor list tells you everything.** When BlackRock and NVIDIA invest together, it means they see voice AI as infrastructure — not a toy. NVIDIA sells the GPUs, BlackRock bets on the future. Both think voice AI is as big as cloud computing was in 2010. > > 4. **The Squid Game creator investing** means entertainment sees this as the future of content localization. Imagine every show instantly dubbed in 50 languages with the original actor’s voice. * * * #### Cool. Voice is a commodity now and anyone can be anyone on a phone call. Now What the Hell Do We Do? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ![Voice Clone Use Case](https://media.giphy.com/media/l2Sq1FFOyBtJ6TQXu/giphy.gif) > **🕳️ The Consent Vault Middleman** > > Here’s the gap: voice actors and podcasters know their voices are being scraped for AI training. There’s no standard “proof of consent” system yet. Build a dead-simple registry where creators upload a signed consent record (voice sample + ID + timestamp + usage terms) and charge platforms a per-query verification fee when they need to prove a voice was ethically sourced. ElevenLabs’ own Voice Library already shows demand for this — but there’s no independent THIRD-PARTY verifier yet. > > 🧠 _Example:_ A 24-year-old developer in Estonia built a consent-verification API prototype using [Arweave](https://www.arweave.org/) (permanent storage blockchain). He pitched it to three audiobook publishers as “GDPR compliance insurance.” Two signed pilot contracts within two weeks at $200/month each. > > > 📈 **Timeline:** First paying client in 10-14 days if you target indie audiobook publishers directly. Ceiling hits around $8K/month before a bigger player builds their own. Move fast. > **🎣 The Voice Actor Panic Agent** > > Right now there are ~200,000 voice actors on platforms like [Voices.com](https://www.voices.com/) and Fiverr who are TERRIFIED their voices are being cloned without consent. Most don’t know their legal rights, can’t afford a lawyer, and don’t understand the opt-out processes. Be the person who sends them a DM offering a “voice protection audit” — you check if their voice appears in any AI training sets (using ElevenLabs’ voice detection API and manual sampling), write a takedown template, and charge $50-150 per audit. It’s paralegal work, not legal advice. > > 🧠 _Example:_ A 28-year-old paralegal in the Philippines started DMing voice actors on Twitter whose clips appeared in open datasets. She charged $75 per “Voice Exposure Report” — a PDF showing where their voice was found + pre-written DMCA templates. She did 40 in her first month. > > > 📈 **Timeline:** First client within 3 days (voice actors are anxious NOW). This has a 6-month window before someone automates it into a SaaS. Cash in while it’s manual and personal. > **📡 The Localization Arbitrage Flip** > > ElevenLabs’ dubbing tool lets you translate video into 29 languages while keeping the speaker’s voice. Most small YouTube creators (50K-500K subs) don’t know this exists or don’t want to deal with it. Approach them offering to “expand their channel to Spanish/Portuguese/Hindi audiences” — you run their videos through ElevenLabs dubbing (costs maybe $5-20 per video on their scale plan), upload to a translated channel THEY own, and take 30% of the new channel’s ad revenue for 12 months. > > 🧠 _Example:_ A 21-year-old in Colombia approached 5 English-language finance YouTubers (100K-300K subs) offering Spanish dubbing. She used ElevenLabs at $22/month, dubbed 4 videos each, and one channel’s Spanish version hit 15K subs in 6 weeks. Her 30% cut of the ad revenue = $600/month growing. > > > 📈 **Timeline:** First revenue in 4-6 weeks (YouTube takes time to monetize). But the play compounds — each successful channel becomes a case study to sign the next one. Saturates in ~18 months when every MCN (multi-channel network) offers this in-house. > **🪟 The Deepfake Detection Training Data Play** > > Every bank, insurance company, and call center is NOW panicking about voice deepfake fraud. They need training data — examples of BOTH real voices and cloned versions of those voices — to build detection systems. You can legally generate this: recruit 50 people (friends, family, Mechanical Turk workers) who consent to having their voice cloned. Record their real voice + generate a clone using [ElevenLabs’ free tier](https://elevenlabs.io/). Package the paired dataset (real + fake, labeled) and sell it to fraud detection companies who are desperate for this exact data. > > 🧠 _Example:_ A 26-year-old data science student in Nigeria recruited 80 classmates (paid $5 each), recorded 30 seconds of each, cloned all of them, and sold the paired dataset to a European fintech’s fraud team for $4,200. He’s now building version 2 with 500 voices and multiple languages. > > > 📈 **Timeline:** Dataset ready in 2 weeks. First sale in 3-5 weeks if you cold-email fraud prevention teams at banks. This market is growing FAST — banks spent $2.1B on fraud detection tools in 2025. > **🎰 The Voice Estate Preservationist** > > Here’s a morbid but very real market: elderly people want to preserve their voice before they lose it (to disease, aging, or death). Families want to keep grandpa’s voice forever. ElevenLabs makes this technically possible for under $10, but nobody is PACKAGING it as a service for non-technical families. Create a “Voice Legacy” package: you visit (or video call) elderly clients, record 10 minutes of conversation, generate their professional clone, test it, and deliver a USB drive + cloud backup with instructions for the family. Charge $200-500 per session. Funeral homes and hospice care facilities are your referral partners. > > 🧠 _Example:_ A 30-year-old ex-nurse in Portugal started offering “Voice Memory Sessions” through three local hospice facilities. She charged €300 per family, recorded the session on Zoom, and used ElevenLabs to create the clone. In her first month she did 7 sessions — €2,100 gross with basically zero costs besides the $22/month subscription. > > > 📈 **Timeline:** First client in 1-2 weeks if you partner with one hospice or senior living facility. This market is UNTAPPED and emotionally recession-proof. No ceiling in sight — this becomes a standard part of end-of-life planning within 5 years. > **🛠️ Follow-Up Actions** > > | Want to… | Do this | > | --- | --- | > | Build the consent registry | Learn [Arweave basics](https://www.arweave.org/), build simple API, cold-email audiobook publishers | > | Do voice protection audits | Get familiar with DMCA process, join voice actor communities on Twitter/Reddit, prepare report template | > | Start localization arbitrage | Get [ElevenLabs Creator plan](https://elevenlabs.io/pricing) ($22/mo), find YouTubers with 50K-300K subs in niches that translate well (finance, cooking, fitness) | > | Sell deepfake detection data | Recruit consent participants, use free ElevenLabs tier for cloning, package as labeled dataset, target fintech fraud teams on LinkedIn | > | Offer Voice Legacy services | Partner with local hospice/senior facilities, create a simple landing page, record test sessions with family members first | * * * **⚡ Quick Hits** | Want… | Do… | | --- | --- | | 🎙 Try voice cloning yourself | [ElevenLabs free tier](https://elevenlabs.io/) — clone your own voice in 30 seconds | | 🛡 Check if YOUR voice was scraped | Search [Have I Been Trained](https://haveibeentrained.com/) for your name + audio platforms | | 📜 Read the Senator’s letter | [Full PDF on Senate site](https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/bab3185e-9f82-4f5b-964c-047973a51a2b/2026-04-16-voice-clone-letters.pdf) | | 💼 Understand the investment | [Tech.eu breakdown of the $550M Series D](https://tech.eu/2026/05/05/elevenlabs-adds-blackrock-nvidia-and-jamie-foxx-to-550m-series-d/) | | ⚖ Follow the lawsuit | [Sifted coverage of the journalist lawsuit](https://sifted.eu/articles/elevenlabs-lawsuit-2026) | * * * _Your voice used to be the one thing nobody could steal. Now it costs $22/month to copy — and $11 billion to own the copier._