ElevenLabs on CEE’s “Joker Card”

How bad can watching a movie with a voice-over actually be? Pretty bad, especially when the same narrator reads every character with the same monotonous tone.

Yet that very Polish frustration eventually helped inspire a company now valued at $11 billion. And for Antoni Rytel, Strategy at ElevenLabs, the story of how ElevenLabs went from a local problem to one of Europe’s biggest AI success stories says something broader about what Central and Eastern Europe is capable of building.

It starts with childhood friends Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, who met in high school more than 12 years ago and later both moved to the UK to study. “We would get together to learn more about technologies we wanted to understand better, and one of them was voice,” Staniszewski has recalled.

As they explored the technology, they realized how much opportunity remained in AI-generated speech. Then they connected it with something they knew all too well from growing up in Poland: foreign movies where a single narrator would read all the lines. That frustration became the starting point for ElevenLabs and its mission “to make quality content available across all languages.”

Fast-forward to today, and the scale is very different.

Polish-founded ElevenLabs recently raised $500 million (€425.28 million) in a Series D round led by Sequoia Capital, reaching an $11 billion valuation. Poland itself has become an equity investor in ElevenLabs.

Speaking with The Recursive at the CEE AI Summit in Prague, Antoni Rytel, Strategy at ElevenLabs, says he sees ElevenLabs’ trajectory as part of a much bigger story about the region.

“Ultimately, the idea behind it, the inspiration that drove the company forward, was Central Eastern European and, to be precise, Polish in essence."

The Recursive spoke with Rytel about the company's roots, CEE's engineering advantage, Europe's position in the global AI race, and what needs to happen for more globally competitive technology companies to emerge from the region.