From $6.6 to $22 billion: ElevenLabs completes its second employee tender in a year
The company's valuation has doubled in eight months, and new investors including Goldman Sachs, EQT and state-linked funds are joining for the first time — but every number comes from the company itself.
ElevenLabs announced on September 30, 2026 that it had recently closed a $300 million employee tender offer at a valuation of $22 billion. The tender was led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price, which the company describes as long-term institutional investors with the experience the next growth phase requires. The figure is, according to the company, a doubling of the valuation from the Series D round in February 2026 — and a tripling from the previous employee tender, announced a little over a year earlier.
A tripling in a little over a year
In an announcement on September 8, 2025, ElevenLabs stated that it had completed a $100 million employee tender at a valuation of $6.6 billion, led by Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from among others a16z, Smash Capital and World Innovation Lab. The new $300 million tender at $22 billion thus marks a tripling of the valuation in a little over a year, measured between two liquidity events of the same type.
New investors this time are EQT, Goldman Sachs, GIC, OTPP (Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan), Sapphire Ventures and BDT & MSD — all, according to the company, investing in ElevenLabs for the first time. They invested alongside existing owners including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, ICONIQ, D.E. Shaw, Evantic, DISRUPTIVE and Alkeon.
Why the investor mix matters
The shift from traditional growth funds to large institutional and state-linked buyers is one of the story's most concrete signals. Wellington and T. Rowe Price led the tender, and the company describes them as long-term institutional investors. The fact that pension and wealth managers such as GIC and OTPP, together with Goldman Sachs and EQT, are coming in for the first time points toward a more institutional ownership profile than a classic VC story — an interpretation of the announcement, not a documented change in the company's strategy.
Co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski said, according to the reporting, that as the company grows, it is important to let employees take part in some of the value they create for customers. Emma Norchet of T. Rowe Price said that ElevenLabs' combined work on research, product and deployment has given the company a structural advantage as it grows its business for conversational agents.
All quotes and figures are conveyed via Unite.AI, which reports the company's own announcements.
The numbers the company uses to justify the price
The company linked the tender to a series of its own key metrics about the business around ElevenAgents, its conversational agent platform:
- Enterprise customers now account for 55 percent of revenue, according to the company.
- The technology is said, per the company, to be used in daily operations at five of the world's ten largest technology companies, five of the ten largest insurance companies and four of the ten largest telecom companies.
- The agents now handle more than 15 million conversations per week, a tripling since February. The company cites use cases such as refunds and exchanges, insurance renewals, mobile plan upgrades, healthcare appointment booking and access to public services.
- ElevenAgents' annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew by more than three times over the same period, the company states.
Taken together, the figures point in the same direction: ElevenLabs is no longer positioning itself primarily as a tool company for audio generation, but as a provider of operated customer agents for large organizations — and is using the growth in that business to justify the valuation jump.
What is confirmed — and what is not
There is reason to read the numbers precisely. First, all information about the event is conveyed through a single secondary source, Unite.AI, which cites the company's own statements. The valuation, the revenue mix, the conversation volume and the ARR growth are all company-provided and independently unverified.
Second, there is a difference between a tender valuation and a valuation in a priced financing round. A tender is about existing shareholders — here mainly employees — selling shares to new and existing investors on the secondary market. The price is set in a limited negotiation over a limited number of shares, and does not necessarily say what a fully priced round would have yielded. It is also not disclosed how much of the $300 million was actually paid to employees, and how much went to new investors' purchases.
Third, the figures vary in hardness. The valuation and the investor names are concretely reported from the announcement. But claims like "five of the ten largest" technology companies or ARR growth of "more than three times" cannot be verified without access to the company's accounts, and should be read as the company's own narrative.
What remains to be answered
Several open questions remain. It has not been stated how the actual per-share pricing was determined, or whether there are terms that distinguish the tender from an ordinary round. Nor has it been independently confirmed how much of the growth in agent conversations comes from paying customers versus pilots or trials. And with a tripling of the valuation in one year, it is an open question what revenue growth underlies it — the company has not disclosed total revenue figures in connection with the announcement.
What is certain about the story is the liquidity event as the company itself presented it on September 30, 2026: $300 million to employees, a $22 billion valuation, new names from Goldman Sachs to GIC on the ownership list, and a doubling in eight months.