ElevenLabs has brought on Ashley Kramer as its inaugural chief revenue officer. She previously led enterprise sales at OpenAI and earlier held posts at GitLab Inc., Oracle Corp., and NASA. The hire arrives as the company leans harder into business buyers over consumers; enterprise now makes up a majority of revenue compared with 40% a year ago. Chief Executive Officer Mati Staniszewski called that shift an inflection point.
Kramer said she decided to join before the recent senior departures at OpenAI, a stretch that saw Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser and Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap depart, as did Fidji Simo, who had been responsible for a large share of the company's core business. Her move, she said, was about joining a "world-class team."
ElevenLabs develops voice and audio models that run AI agents for sales teams and customer contact centers, handle audiobook narration, and convert ads into additional languages. Its customer list includes Meta Platforms Inc., Stripe LLC, Deustche Telekom AG, and Revolut Ltd.
In July, ElevenLabs said its annual recurring revenue topped $600 million. ARR is an annualized revenue metric that startups often use to show growth. Bloomberg News also reported the company has held early talks about a program that would let employees sell shares in a deal valuing the firm at roughly $22 billion.
As leadership headlines come and go, steady habits matter most, so get our free Always Be Buying E-Book today
Even with the recent momentum, ElevenLabs is still smaller on revenue run rate and valuation than the biggest general-purpose model makers. Bloomberg reported that Anthropic PBC, which is preparing for a major listing, told investors its annualized revenue is on track to reach $65 billion. OpenAI is pacing toward more than $40 billion in annualized revenue based on current performance.
Frontier AI firms are under the gun to demonstrate profitability because training and running models demand enormous, expensive compute. They are also up against a fast-growing group of Chinese developers releasing models near the cutting edge at far lower prices. Alibaba's Qwen team this year open sourced the Qwen3-TTS family - a set of speech-generation models featuring voice cloning and voice design - and Fish Audio made the S2 speech model's weights publicly available.
Here is the through-line: ElevenLabs is betting that businesses will pay for more than a bargain-bin model.