ElevenLabs Commits 'Hundreds of Millions of Dollars' to India — Its Biggest Market by Signups, With 100 Million AI Agent Conversations a Year

ElevenLabs plans to invest "hundreds of millions of dollars" in India, co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski told Reuters on Tuesday, in one of the largest bets yet by a global AI company on the country's voice AI economy. The exact figure and timeline were not disclosed. Staniszewski also said the London-based company is open to acquiring Indian businesses, though he declined to name any targets.

Why India, and why now: by the company's own account, India is ElevenLabs' largest market by user signups and its second-largest by enterprise revenue. Its India operation works with 250 enterprises and handles 100 million AI agent conversations a year across 14 Indian languages — company-reported figures, not independently audited. More than 25,000 Indian developers and businesses use its API each month, a number the company says has grown roughly 2.5 times over the past year. The announcement landed as the India Mobile Congress opened in New Delhi, the same week global AI firms have been stacking up India commitments.

The money goes toward local teams, model development and Indian-language work. The India team has grown roughly fivefold since the start of the year and is targeted to reach close to 100 people by the end of 2026, with roles spanning sales, customer success, product and engineering; eight forward-deployed engineers are already in place, and a Bengaluru office is being finalized even as the company stays remote-first. The latest text-to-speech model supports 14 Indian languages, and the company says broader Indian-language coverage is coming in the months ahead.

The enterprise usage numbers the company points to are concrete, though all self-reported: Meesho automates more than 60,000 customer support calls a day in Hindi and English on the platform, Cars24 handles over 20,000 multilingual conversations a month, and customers include Mahindra, TVS Motor Company, IDFC Bank, JioStar, Physicswallah, Havells and Razorpay. ElevenLabs says it has paid more than $1 million to Indian voice talent through its Voice Actor Marketplace and given free API access to over 500 Indian startups through its grants program.

The government side is moving too. Karnataka's Innovation and Technology Society signed an agreement with ElevenLabs to explore Kannada voice AI for skilling, citizen services and grievance redressal, along with responsible AI work and voice restoration for people who cannot speak. Company field CTO Alex Holt told the Times of India that work with Indian customers is feeding back into the global product — a configuration developed with an Indian customer, which makes frontier models more reliable when users switch languages mid-sentence, has been shipped platform-wide as a toggle.

The expansion comes off a strong financial run. ElevenLabs was valued at $22 billion after a $300 million employee tender offer in late September backed by Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price — roughly double the $11 billion Series D valuation it reached in February. Its backers include NVIDIA, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, EQT and Goldman Sachs, and the company says its platform now handles more than 15 million voice agent conversations a week across 90-plus languages.

The broader read: the frontier of voice AI is no longer English accuracy, it is language breadth and unit economics — and India is where both get stress-tested at once, with 22 official languages, price-sensitive customers and production deployments already live. ElevenLabs is treating the country as a market, a talent base and a research input simultaneously. The rivals chasing the same multilingual enterprise deals — from local startups to global cloud providers — now have a much better-funded problem on their hands.