Mati Staniszewski

Co-founder & CEO ElevenLabs

Last Reviewed: September 24, 2026

Executive Summary

Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder and chief executive of ElevenLabs, the voice AI company he started in 2022 with Piotr Dabkowski, a friend from school in Poland. ElevenLabs began with speech synthesis and has grown into a platform for voice agents, dubbing and audio generation used by enterprises, developers and creators. Its growth has been rapid: in February 2026 it raised a $500 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital at an $11 billion valuation, and in May 2026 it said annual recurring revenue had passed $500 million. Staniszewski trained as a mathematician at Imperial College London and worked at Opera, BlackRock and Palantir before founding the company. Since May 2025 he has also been a director of Klarna Group.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded ElevenLabs in 2022 and serves as its chief executive officer.
• Led a $500 million Series D at an $11 billion valuation, led by Sequoia Capital with Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Lightspeed and others, announced 4 February 2026; ElevenLabs put its total funding at $781 million across five rounds.
• ElevenLabs reported closing 2025 with more than $330 million in ARR and passing $500 million in the first four months of 2026, alongside new investors including BlackRock, Wellington, NVIDIA and Deutsche Telekom.
• Director of Klarna Group plc since May 2025; re-appointed by shareholders at Klarna’s June 2026 annual general meeting.
• Worked at Palantir Technologies from 2018 to 2022, BlackRock from 2017 to 2018 and Opera from 2014 to 2016.
• Holds a BSc in Mathematics from Imperial College London.

Professional Journey

Staniszewski grew up in Poland and moved to London to study mathematics at Imperial College London, where he took a BSc. According to the director biography Klarna files with the SEC, he worked at Opera Norway, the browser company, from 2014 to 2016, then at BlackRock from 2017 to 2018, and at Palantir Technologies from October 2018 to May 2022. ElevenLabs describes his Palantir work as helping organisations deploy emerging technologies.

He co-founded ElevenLabs in 2022 with Piotr Dabkowski, whom he had known since school in Poland. The Klarna filing describes ElevenLabs as a software company specialised in advanced voice synthesis technology; it has since built out voice agents that businesses deploy for customer support and other work. Klarna, for example, has published with ElevenLabs an account of using its voice AI agents in customer support.

Growth has been fast and heavily funded. ElevenLabs’s February 2026 Series D, a $500 million round led by Sequoia Capital with Andreessen Horowitz quadrupling its participation and ICONIQ tripling its own, valued the company at $11 billion and brought its total raised to $781 million over five rounds since 2022. Announcing it, the company said it had closed 2025 with more than $330 million in ARR. In May 2026 it reported crossing $500 million in ARR, added institutional and strategic investors including BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, NVIDIA, Santander and Deutsche Telekom, and completed a $100 million secondary tender offer, its second in under a year. By then it listed offices from London, New York and San Francisco to Warsaw, Tokyo, Bengaluru and São Paulo.

Staniszewski has made the case publicly that voice will become the main way people interact with technology, including in a February 2026 interview with TechCrunch. In 2026 ElevenLabs held its summit in Warsaw, expanded into Spain, enlarged its London headquarters and announced a partnership with the UK government on voice AI for public services.

Alongside ElevenLabs he joined the board of Klarna Group plc in May 2025, ahead of its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange that September. He was designated a Class A director at the IPO, stood for re-appointment at Klarna’s first annual general meeting as a public company on 22 June 2026, and was re-appointed.

Education

Imperial College London

BSc, Mathematics