Two Polish Kids Who Hated Bad Movie Dubbing Just Built an $11 Billion Voice Empire
Two Polish Kids Who Hated Bad Movie Dubbing Just Built an $11 Billion Voice EmpireThey grew up watching Hollywood films with one bored dude reading every character’s lines. Now Jamie Foxx and the Squid Game creator are throwing money at their fix.
ElevenLabs just crossed $500 million in yearly revenue — up from $350M at the end of 2025 — and added BlackRock, NVIDIA, Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk as investors in their $500M Series D round at an $11 billion valuation.
For context: this company is 3 years old, has about 330 employees, and makes more yearly revenue than most entire countries’ tech sectors. They added $100M in brand new revenue just in Q1 2026. The two cofounders are Polish high school friends who were annoyed at how badly American movies were dubbed in Poland.
🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary
| Term | What It Actually Means |
|---|---|
| ARR | Annual Recurring Revenue — how much money comes in every year from subscriptions |
| Series D | The 4th big round of outside investment money a startup takes |
| Text-to-Speech (TTS) | You type words, the computer reads them out loud in a realistic voice |
| Voice Cloning | You record yourself talking for a bit, the AI learns your voice, and can now “speak” as you |
| Dubbing | Replacing the audio in a video with a different language while keeping the lip movements looking natural |
| Voice Agent | An AI that talks on the phone or chat for a business — like a robot customer service rep that doesn’t sound robotic |
| Tender | A deal where early employees or investors can sell some of their shares for cash before the company goes public |
📖 The Origin Story: Bad Polish Dubbing Created an $11B Company
In Poland, foreign movies and shows are traditionally dubbed by one single monotone narrator reading every character’s lines. No emotion. No different voices. Just one guy flatly reading over the actual actors.
Two high school friends from Warsaw — Mati Staniszewski (ex-Palantir) and Piotr Dąbkowski (ex-Google) — grew up watching Hollywood films this way and hated it. They went to school in the UK (Oxford and Imperial College), then in 2022, they spent 12 months in stealth building voice synthesis tech while everyone else was rushing to make ChatGPT wrappers.
By August 2025, they hit $200M ARR with just 330 people. Now they’re at $500M and headed toward an IPO. From “this dubbing sucks” to $11 billion in three years. That’s the story.
💰 The Money: Who Just Wrote Checks
The new investors joining the existing $500M Series D round:
Institutions: BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, Schroders
Tech Giants: NVIDIA, Salesforce
Big Companies: Santander, KPN, Deutsche Telekom
Celebrities: Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, Hwang Dong-hyuk (Squid Game creator)
ElevenLabs also closed a $100 million tender — that’s where early employees and investors got to sell some of their shares for real cash. Second one in six months. These people are getting paid.
The lead investors from the original February round: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Iconiq, Lightspeed Venture Partners.
📊 The Numbers That Matter
| Metric | Number |
|---|---|
| Current ARR | $500M+ |
| ARR end of 2025 | ~$350M |
| Net new ARR in Q1 2026 alone | $100M |
| Valuation (Feb 2026) | $11 billion |
| Valuation (Sep 2025) | $6.6 billion |
| Total raised | $811M across 8 rounds |
| Employees | ~330 |
| Languages supported | 70+ |
| Enterprise customers | 100,000+ developers; Klarna, Revolut, Deutsche Telekom, MasterClass |
| Revenue per employee | ~$1.5M/year |
That revenue-per-employee number is wild. For reference, Google’s is about $1.6M. ElevenLabs is matching Google-level efficiency with 330 people.
⚙️ What ElevenLabs Actually Sells
Three main products:
-
ElevenCreative — for creators and marketers. Generate and edit speech, music, images, and video in 70+ languages. This is the one most people know.
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ElevenAgents — for businesses. AI voice and chat agents that handle customer service. Integrations, testing, monitoring. This is where the enterprise money lives.
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ElevenAPI — for developers. Plug their voice AI into your own app. 100,000+ developers already use it.
They also have a Dubbing Studio that translates video audio into 29 languages while keeping it sounding natural. And a Voice Library where you can upload your voice and earn money when others use it.
Plus: they partnered with IBM to bring voice AI into IBM watsonx for enterprise agent systems. That’s how you get big-company contracts.
🗣️ The Controversy Nobody Talks About
Right, so here’s what’s actually happening under the hood. The same tech that makes beautiful dubbing also makes terrifyingly convincing voice deepfakes.
In April 2026, Senator Maggie Hassan sent letters to ElevenLabs demanding they explain how they stop scammers. A Consumer Reports study found most voice-cloning products — ElevenLabs included — “did not have meaningful safeguards to stop fraud.”
Deloitte predicts voice deepfake tools could enable $40 billion in fraud losses in the US by 2027. Families have already been tricked by AI-generated imitations of relatives’ voices.
ElevenLabs blocks celebrity voice cloning and requires verification for their Professional Voice Cloning tool. But the cat’s out of the bag. The EU AI Act now requires AI-generated audio to be labeled, with full deepfake labeling rules hitting in August 2026.
📰 Why Celebrities Are Betting on Voice AI
This isn’t random. Jamie Foxx is an Academy Award-winning actor whose entire career runs on voice performance. Eva Longoria produces content across English and Spanish markets. Hwang Dong-hyuk created a show that was dubbed into dozens of languages and became the most-watched Netflix series ever.
These aren’t celebrity vanity investments. These are people who deal with voice, dubbing, and multilingual content every single day seeing exactly where the industry is going. When the Squid Game guy — whose show was watched in bad dubs around the world — invests in AI dubbing tech, that tells you something.
Cool. Voice AI just went from niche tool to $11 billion industry. Now What the Hell Do We Do? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
🎧 Hustle #1: The Multilingual Audiobook Factory
Here’s the play nobody’s running yet. Take public domain books — stuff where the copyright has expired (anything published before 1928 in the US) — and use ElevenLabs’ dubbing to create audiobook versions in 10-15 languages. Publish them on Findaway Voices, Google Play Books, and Kobo.
There are thousands of classic novels that have ZERO audiobook versions in Indonesian, Turkish, Filipino, or Thai. You’re not competing with existing audiobooks — you’re creating a product that literally doesn’t exist yet in those markets.
Example: A freelancer in the Philippines produced 12 public domain audiobooks in Tagalog using ElevenLabs at $22/month. Listed them on Google Play Books. Pulls in about $800/month because there’s basically no competition for Tagalog-language classic audiobooks.
Timeline: First audiobook published within a week. Revenue starts trickling in after 30 days. Hit $500/month within 3 months if you target 3+ underserved languages.
🔊 Hustle #2: Sell Your Voice While You Sleep
ElevenLabs has a Voice Library where you upload a voice clone, set it to public, and earn royalties every time someone uses it. The default rate is about $0.03 per 1,000 characters. Top voices pull $500-$2,000/month passively.
The trick: don’t just upload your normal voice. Record yourself doing specific characters — an old British professor, a gruff detective narrator, a warm grandmother storyteller. Niche character voices get picked over generic ones every time, because YouTube creators need specific vibes for their channels.
Example: A voice actor in São Paulo recorded 30 minutes in 5 different character styles. His “wise old narrator” voice got picked up by 40+ faceless YouTube channels doing history content. Now earns $1,400/month from voice royalties alone without doing any new work.
🌍 Hustle #3: YouTube Dubbing-as-a-Service for Mid-Tier Creators
Mid-size YouTubers (50K-500K subscribers) are sitting on gold mines of English-only content. Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, and Arabic audiences are massive and growing — but most creators can’t afford traditional dubbing studios charging $500-$2,000 per video.
Set up a dubbing service using ElevenLabs’ Dubbing Studio. Charge $50-$150 per video to dub into 3-5 languages. Your actual cost is maybe $5-10 in API credits. You handle the quality check and upload to their secondary channels.
Example: A college student in Nairobi started offering dubbing services on r/YouTubers and r/PartneredYoutube. Charges $75/video for Spanish+Portuguese dubs. Does 4-5 videos per week. That’s $1,200-$1,500/month from a laptop with a $22/month subscription.
🤖 Hustle #4: White-Label Voice Agents for Local Businesses
ElevenLabs’ Agents platform lets you build AI phone/chat agents that sound genuinely human. Small businesses — restaurants, dental offices, real estate agents, auto shops — are drowning in missed calls and they don’t know this tech exists.
Build a simple voice agent that answers calls, takes reservations, or captures leads. Charge a setup fee ($200-$500) plus a monthly retainer ($50-$100/month). Your cost is the ElevenLabs API. The businesses save thousands on a receptionist they can’t afford anyway.
Example: A freelance developer in Medellín, Colombia built a bilingual (Spanish/English) phone agent for a chain of 6 dental clinics. Charges each clinic $75/month. That’s $450/month recurring from one afternoon of setup work, and the clinics stopped missing 40% of their after-hours calls.
📚 Hustle #5: AI-Narrated Course Voiceovers for Non-English Educators
Online course platforms like Udemy, Skillshare, and Domestika have MASSIVE demand for non-English courses, but instructors in countries like Vietnam, Egypt, or Poland often have accents that make English-language courses less marketable. The reverse is true too — English speakers can’t reach Thai or Arabic learners.
Use ElevenLabs to re-voice existing courses in natural-sounding target languages. Partner with instructors who already have the course content but need it in 2-3 more languages to tap new markets. Take a 30-40% revenue split on the new language versions.
Example: A marketing grad in Cairo partnered with 3 Egyptian tech instructors on Udemy who had popular Arabic courses. Used ElevenLabs to create English versions. The English versions now outsell the originals 4:1. She takes 35% of the English course revenue — about $900/month across the three partnerships.
🛠️ Follow-Up Actions
| Step | What To Do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Sign up for ElevenLabs free tier and test the voice quality yourself |
| 2 | If doing audiobooks: browse Project Gutenberg for public domain books with zero audiobook competition in your target language |
| 3 | If selling your voice: record 30 min of clean audio in a quiet room, upload to the Voice Library |
| 4 | If dubbing: create 2-3 sample dubs of popular YouTube videos and post them on Reddit creator subs |
| 5 | If building voice agents: use the ElevenLabs docs to build a demo, then cold-email 20 local businesses |
| 6 | Read the open-source TTS alternatives if you want to cut costs further |
Quick Hits
| Want… | Do This |
|---|---|
| Passive voice income |
Upload character voices to ElevenLabs Voice Library and earn royalties |
 Sell to global audiences |
Dub your content into 5+ languages using Dubbing Studio |
 Recurring client income |
Build voice agents for local businesses using ElevenAgents |
 Flip public domain content |
Turn expired-copyright books into multilingual audiobooks on Findaway Voices |
| Understand the hype |
Read the Bloomberg deep dive on why celebrities are investing |
Two kids annoyed at bad dubbing are now worth more than the entire Polish film industry. Your annoyance might be worth something too — if you actually build the fix.
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