AI voice company ElevenLabs to invest millions in India, says it will create a 100-member team

London-based AI voice company ElevenLabs is expanding in India with plans to invest millions of dollars in the country. India is ElevenLabs’ biggest market outside of the US, and now, the company wants to grow with local teams and models designed for Indian languages.ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski said that the company is planning to invest "hundreds of millions of dollars" in its India operations. The company is working on building a team of close to 100 people in the country by the end of the year. “I 100 per cent believe India can lead in voice AI... India can be the laboratory of the world for voice AI," Staniszewski told CNBC TV18.Mati Staniszewski added that the company was going to focus on training its voice models on Indian languages from the ground-up. “Even when we started with V1, the first model we released, Hindi was a big part of it. The architecture was optimised from the very start to support those languages,” he explained. “In the past, companies would do English first and then bring it to other languages. We didn't like that idea. We think you really need to build locally, and that means not only the team but also the architecture.” ElevenLabs currently supports 14 Indian languages and is working to add 22 more.ElevenLabs General manager and country leader Karthik Rajaram said the company has worked with 250 enterprises in the region and is seeing 100 million annual AI-agent conversations across 14 Indian languages. He stated more than 25,000 developers and businesses in India use its API each month, up about 2.5 times over the past year. "So what's striking is that it is not just only the size of the opportunity that we have in the country. It is the sheer breadth and complexity of the market that we have,” Rajbram said during a media briefing. India customers named by the company include PhysicsWallah, Havells and Razorpay, while other clients mentioned in company statements include Meesho, Urban Company, Cars24, 99acres, TVS Motor, Mahindra and IDFC First Bank.What is ElevenLabs?Founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, ElevenLabs builds AI voice technology that can convert text into speech, clone voices and run conversational agents. The company has gained popularity among creators. Creators can lend their voice to ElevenLabs’ models and earn royalties. As per the company, about 700 Indian creators are part of its programme. That is, a creator can lend their voice to the platform, which can then be accessed by users, giving a more human-sounding voice to the models.ElevenLabs’ tools are used for tasks such as customer support while processing refunds or renewing insurance policies. The company said its platform is built around conversation, intelligence and workflow layers, combining speech-to-text. Its agents are designed in-line with Indian voices and accents.ElevenLabs signs MoUs in IndiaAlongside plans to expand its operations in India, ElevenLabs announced a partnership with the Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society. Under the memorandum of understanding (MoU), ElevenLabs will provide free lifetime licences to eligible citizens identified by the state government or institutions working under it through its One Million Voices programme. "Voice is the most natural way people interact with technology, and we're excited to work with the Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society to explore how voice AI can make citizen services more accessible and restore the voices of those who have lost theirs,” Mati Staniszewski said.The initiative is meant for people who have lost speech because of oral and throat cancer, ALS and other neurological or degenerative conditions, and can allow them to communicate using a synthetic version of their own voice, including in Kannada. KITS is engaging with Mysuru's All India Institute of Speech and Hearing to explore implementation and identify beneficiaries.Separately, ElevenLabs signed a national-level memorandum of understanding with the Coalition of the Willing, which is working with the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, The Quantum Hub and the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to expand access to voice technology for people with speech, hearing and voice-loss disabilities.The company’s push in India comes as global AI firms deepen their focus in the country. In the past few months, OpenAI and Anthropic have opened their first India offices and expanded local partnerships, alongside large commitments from Amazon, Microsoft and Google in AI, cloud and data centre infrastructure.- Ends