At Imperial College London, a maths student started a conference for people who liked maths for no reason except that it was fun. It was called Mathscon. Mati Staniszewski organised it before he had a company, a salary, or any idea that a movie dub would one day change his life.
He was born in 1995 in a town outside Warsaw, and moved to the capital for high school at Copernicus Bilingual. There he met Piotr Dabkowski. They were friends first, and stayed friends. That detail matters, because most start-up partnerships are made over a cap table. This one was made over lunch breaks.
That detail matters, because most start-up partnerships are made over a cap table.
The two went separate ways. Staniszewski studied mathematics in London, then worked at Opera Software and at BlackRock, where he joined the Portfolio Analytics Group and helped launch the Aladdin Wealth platform. After that he spent time at Palantir as a deployment strategist, running big implementations for governments and companies. Dabkowski became a machine learning engineer at Google.
What bound them back together was a small, almost silly annoyance. They had grown up with American films dubbed into Polish by a single flat voice reading every role. Watching poorly dubbed films, as the story is told, planted the idea that voice technology could carry emotion across languages. That was not a grand thesis. It was an irritation they could not leave alone.
They named the company after 11 November, Poland's Independence Day, and added Labs to signal research. In January 2023 they raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Credo Ventures. By June a $19 million Series A, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, put the value near $100 million. A public beta had already crossed a million registered users.
The growth came with a cost. In 2024 fake robocalls imitating Joe Biden were traced to tools built on ElevenLabs. Staniszewski said the company was dedicated to preventing misuse. The same models that comfort a person who lost their voice can fool a voter, and a founder has to own both.
The numbers went up quickly: $1.1 billion in January 2024, $3.3 billion a year later, $11 billion by February 2026. In March 2026 the company pledged $1 billion towards voice restoration for a million people with permanent voice loss.
The quiet insight is in the first scene. Mathscon was never a business, and nobody paid for it. But a founder who spends student years building something fun for strangers is practising a skill: gathering people around an idea before there is money in it.