Deep Dive Into ElevenLabs, AI Co That Did PM Modi’s Voice-over In Podcast With Lex Fridman

Welcome back you Sir with us on Startup St. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent interview with Lex Friedman made global headlines not just for the depth of the conversation, but for what many are calling the best dubbing to date. 11 Labs was behind the hyper realistic AI translation. And to talk to us about the future road map of the newly turned Unicorn, I have Siddharth Srinivasan, the GTM of I11 Labs. Siddharth, thank you so much for taking time out and being here with us on Startup St. You know this isn't the first leader you've used your AI translation tool for, right? You've also done it for Volodimir Zelensky in the in the past as well. If you could sort of talk to us about how these projects came to be and the kind of demand that you're witnessing for your voice dubbing. Hey, thank you so much for having me here. Its lovely to be on your show. You're right. You know, our partnership with Lex Treatment has actually been a few of these content pieces old, You know, we've done Blotman Zelensky, we have done Javier Malay and now we have the privilege to do Mr. Modi for I think a really interesting and long form piece of content. We're a 2 year old company and what we pride ourselves on is having really the best voice technology on the planet. We have millions of users all around the world and I think it's a natural consequence of that. Over a period of time, as the category leader, we found ourselves able to be on these kind of transformative and impactful projects. And so, you know, hopefully the audience, our mission is to really make sure that the content is available in every language and every voice. And hopefully by participating in projects like these, were able to take that piece of content and bring it to the audience in a more authentic experience, preserving the original voice. Absolutely. And, you know, in just two years, you've become a Unicorn, raising your last round of $180 million just a month back, right? If you could take us through how you've used these funds since you've raised them. And you know, what's new ahead for you, what's exciting for you going forward? So you know, in this category, you sort of hang your hat on the quality of research and that's what we primarily are. We are a research company. We're in AI audio lab and we have some fantastic features like from our founder Piotr who's in TIME 100, Time 100's top AI, you know, personalities and you know, we start with that and I think a lot of the funds that we have will really go into Co research and infra. On top of that, you know, we are building enterprise ready products today. So if you look at our workflows being used by, you know, Fortune 500 companies, we're investing a lot to sort of make sure that our technologies productized and reaches the hands of the use as well. And the third part is really go to market. You know, I think maybe about 18 months back we had five employees. Now we've got 150 employees. We are almost 10 people in India in fact. And so a lot of these go into localization and investments, which make sure that our technology finds its hands in terms of the users for all of the fantastic use cases that we think we can power. Absolutely. And you know, before I, I delve deeper into the India market, right, if you could sort of just tell us how big is this AI voice market? If you could sort of, you know, take us through all the other offerings that you have as well. And how do you keep innovating to stay ahead of the big guys like Google Open AI, you know, and the likes of them? And how many languages are you available in? Sounds good. That's many questions in one. Let me take them. So first of all, you know, I think what's really interesting is India has actually become our highest user market globally. From around November to around January, we actually saw 50% growth in usage. And you know that trend sort of continues, right? So it's a really voracious market when you sort of think of language solutions. And that's no surprise. We are a multicultural, multilingual, multi dialect market and so when you look at the technology that, you know, our founders sort of built out and our research team is building, which is essentially multi language and multicultural at the heart of it. I think we had great product market fit right from the beginning. Today when you look at the Indian story, you know, you sort of see us in really big media context. So for example, you know, we're partnered, you know, with the fantastic folks at * Cricket where they're taking international cricketers and unlocking experiences in native Indian languages, making it really accessible. So that's an example. We work, for example, with partners like Cube Cinema who actually Dr. accessibility and audio narration through the use of our technology on mainline film releases. So that's on one side and on other side we're powering extremely large volumes of customer support across languages. So I think, you know, this is really a technology that was always had a market ready for it and now the state of technology and product is able to sort of reach the final consumer. You know, if you sort of look at NASSCOM reports, you know the estimates that this is maybe a $1.82 billion market by 20-30. And I think, you know, it has the opportunity to be extremely large and we're surely seeing that in our user base today. And so, yeah, I think what we are looking to do as we round up this year is to continue to innovate on really world class research. You know, apart from having what we think are the best voice models in the world, the most expressive, the fastest voice models for real time conversation, one of the simplest AI agent building platforms. We also just recently launched Scribe, which is actually available in 11 Indian languages. And in all of them, you know, we think it has the highest accuracy compared to any other model that sort of takes your speech and maps into text in the world, right? So that's something we launched. We've got sound effects models and down this year we're going to be innovating more on the model side. So I think you will see that happen. The second thing you will see on top of this world class research is just great product, which allows for various dialects, languages in the India use case to reach the final consumer, right? And in 10 seconds, if you could tell us what's the revenue target for this year? And what about profitability? These are things that we're not disclosing, but what we can say, We've got a great business model. We're well capitalized, and we're investing deep in India. All right, Siddharth, thank you so much for joining us on the show. It was a pleasure talking to you, and we wish you all the best on your journey going forward. Thank you for your time.