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News3 min read·2026-10-21DisconfirmAI Editorial

ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski: Margins Can Squeeze Further, But Market Share Cannot Be Lost

In September 2026, ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski stated clearly at the Nrth conference in Toronto that the company does not mind further gross-margin compression if it means expanding market share. This came against the backdrop of customer Decagon having trained its own voice product on ElevenLabs and now competing with it, revealing the actual economic strategy of an AI voice infrastructure company under pressure toward model quality convergence.

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Original publication time 2026-09-25 00:35 GMT+8

ElevenLabs builds the voice layer of AI—models that turn text into speech that sounds human. Most people have already used it when talking with customer service, without realizing it. Klarna runs first-line phone support for 35 million U.S. customers on it. So do Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Adobe, and a growing list of governments. The company says it is pacing at $600 million in annual recurring revenue and is now reportedly valued at $22 billion by its backers, despite being just four years old.

ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski was asked about gross margins during an interview with TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos at the Nrth conference in Toronto in September 2026. His answer was direct: he does not mind margins getting squeezed even further if it means expanding the company's market share. He said that given the research element, the company is able to fine-tune and constrain models in extremely smart ways to optimize costs, but if savings can be passed on to the customer, they do that. In his view, the biggest thing right now is still proving value and being there with the customer, and once value gets created over the next five years, everyone benefits together.

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This statement only has concrete meaning within ElevenLabs' competitive landscape. Staniszewski acknowledged in the interview that the company is increasingly bumping into its own customers—Decagon, for example, is a conversational AI platform that trained its voice product on ElevenLabs and now competes with it by running queries through its own models. Staniszewski believes the lines between model companies, platform companies, and application companies are becoming blurrier. He cited Anthropic as an example: what was a model company is definitely a platform and increasingly a wide set of applications.

At the same time, Staniszewski revised his judgment on audio model commoditization. He had said at TechCrunch Disrupt the previous year that audio models would be commoditized within a couple of years. Now he acknowledged that the quality delta achievable at the model level is still significant, but pushed the timeline to three to five years. In other words, he believes the technical moat has a window, but not a permanent one.

Putting these together, Staniszewski's strategic logic is: since the model quality gap will narrow within three to five years, and customers can become competitors at any time, trading margin for customer lock-in and integration depth is rational at this stage. ElevenLabs' other moat lies not in the model itself but in data annotation—Staniszewski said the big part of training has not been so much the volume of data but annotating it. The company has thousands of people internally on a contracting basis helping annotate not only what was said, but when people were speaking, how they said things, and what emotions were used. They even brought in voice coaches to detect accents accurately. This operationally intensive data asset is not something open-source models can directly replicate.

However, the boundaries must be clear: Staniszewski declined to disclose specific gross-margin figures. The $600 million ARR is self-reported by the company. The $22 billion valuation is reportedly from a Bloomberg article in July 2026 about tender-offer talks. His statement about not minding margin compression is an expression of strategic intent, not a realized financial result. Whether the promised mutual benefit materializes over the next five years depends on whether the company can recover costs through pricing power after expanding market share, or whether margins get compressed to the point of being unable to cover research and annotation investment.

Sources

  • 原始出处techcrunch.com↗
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