As the investment community eagerly awaits the IPO prospectus from Anthropic in the coming weeks, other rapidly scaling artificial intelligence startups are quietly preparing their own public listings. The latest example is the AI voice company ElevenLabs, which has appointed a chief financial officer as it targets an initial public offering by 2028.
A person familiar with the hiring confirmed that the London-based startup has brought on Ethan Tandowsky, the former CFO of Adyen, the Dutch fintech firm currently valued at $32 billion. Tandowsky served as CFO of Adyen since 2023 and held various internal finance roles around the company's 2018 listing. Notably, Adyen, which trades on the Amsterdam exchange, has seen its share price climb over 80% since its IPO, though its market capitalization has dropped by half when compared to pandemic-era peaks.
As background, ElevenLabs develops proprietary voice models — AI systems specifically engineered for text-to-speech and speech-to-text applications. The company was founded in 2022 by two Polish entrepreneurs, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski. Its earliest customer base consisted largely of individual content creators who leveraged the models to produce voiceovers for YouTube videos. More recently, ElevenLabs has aggressively expanded into the enterprise market, selling AI voice agents to businesses like Stripe, Klarna, and Deutsche Telekom for handling customer service conversations and sales call screening.
The company has also just recruited Ashley Kramer, a former senior executive responsible for enterprise sales at OpenAI, to serve as its first chief revenue officer. Last month, ElevenLabs announced it was on track to reach $600 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), with more than half of that revenue now coming from large enterprise clients. Compare that to the $350 million ARR figure recorded at the end of last year.
Business insiders indicate that the company has already achieved profitability. This puts ElevenLabs — which competes head-to-head with AI customer service agent startups like Sierra and Decagon, as well as industry giants such as OpenAI and Google — in a position where it will likely need to continue accelerating revenue growth ahead of any public listing to justify its private market valuation. Back in February, the company reached a $110 billion valuation after a $500 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. In May, additional investments came in from Nvidia's venture arm, BlackRock, Wellington Management Group, and Santander Bank, though the valuation attached to that round was not publicly disclosed.
Like other AI startups preparing to go public, ElevenLabs' listing plans are heavily dependent on how the Anthropic IPO performs, as well as the expected OpenAI offering next year. The performance of those two companies will set the tone for investor sentiment around capital-intensive AI labs. IPO advisors point out that, beyond its proprietary models, ElevenLabs' voice agents partially rely on models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Similar to many of its peers, the company will need to persuade investors of its products' customer stickiness, even as both AI giants develop their own next-generation models targeting similar use cases.
Investment bankers note that these AI startups also face the challenge of explaining to investors how much they pay Anthropic and OpenAI for third-party large language model access — costs that directly compress profit margins. While an increasing number of comparable startups are opting to build their own models, that strategy drives up spending on server procurement and cloud leasing. Several other AI companies are also planning to list in a comparable timeframe. For instance, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas stated in a June interview that his company similarly hopes to complete its IPO by 2028.