The Voice of AI: Turning It Up to Eleven
2026
| Case No.
E964
| Length
15 pgs.
This case traces the founding and rapid scaling of ElevenLabs, a voice AI company that grew from a weekend coding project between two Polish friends into an $11 billion business with $500 million in annual recurring revenue by early 2026. The case follows co-founders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski as they build a proprietary voice AI model, navigate the challenges of category creation, and ultimately face a critical strategic decision: whether to remain a specialized voice infrastructure provider or expand into a horizontally integrated, full-stack AI platform competing across voice infrastructure, conversational agents, creative tools, and more simultaneously. Having chosen breadth, the company then confronts a deeper question: how far beyond its audio core should it go: integrating video models into its creative suite, chat-based customer service into its agents platform, and competing not just as the best voice company but as a multimodal AI platform against incumbents such as Open AI and Google Deepmind with far greater resources.
Learning Objective
This case helps students analyze the strategic and organizational tradeoffs facing AI-native companies as they scale, including (1) the tension between platform breadth and focus, (2) the design of organizational structures and decision making frameworks under rapid growth, (3) the durability of competitive moats when competing against both well-capitalized incumbents and verticalized specialists in the AI landscape, and (4) the responsibilities of category-creating companies building at the frontier of a new technology.
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