Mati Staniszewski was born in 1995 outside Warsaw and went to Copernicus Bilingual High School in the city, where he met Piotr Dabkowski. He studied mathematics at Imperial College London and founded Mathscon, a student maths conference, there.
He then worked at Opera Software, at BlackRock on the Aladdin Wealth platform, and at Palantir as a Deployment Strategist. Dabkowski became a machine learning engineer at Google.
In 2022 the two founded ElevenLabs after watching badly dubbed films. The company opened a public beta in January 2023, passed one million users by June 2023 and added AI Dubbing in October 2023.
Funding followed fast: a $19 million Series A in June 2023, $80 million at $1.1 billion in January 2024, $180 million at $3.3 billion in January 2025, and $500 million at $11 billion in February 2026. A September 2026 tender valued the company at $22 billion.