After one meeting with the founders, the VC made a $3 billion bet on AI firm ElevenLabs
Carles Reina, GTM Manager at Eleven Labs, shares why he invested in an AI company.
Eleven laboratories
An angel investor who backed a billion-dollar AI startup in its infancy said he decided to invest in the company just 30 minutes after meeting one of its founders.
Carls Reina decided to invest in AI voice startup Eleven Lab in 2022, when he was a venture partner in the pre-seed fund Concept Ventures.
Co-founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, Eleven Labs specializes in advanced text-to-speech and voice cloning technologies. In a January Series C funding round earlier this year, the company raised $180 million in A A valuation of $3.3 billion.
Then in September, the company announced it was allowing employees to sell shares $6.6 billion valuation.
However, before Eleven Labs had a solid product, Reina, who was working at Palantir Technologies at the time, decided to take a chance on the firm after meeting Staniszewski.
“I met Mati when he was at Palantir,” Reena said in an interview with CNBC’s Make It. “We started talking and within 30 minutes of the first conversation I said to him, ‘How much money do you want?'”
Reena explained that before the launch of ChatGPT, voice AI hadn’t received much attention because big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft had text-to-speech products, but it hadn’t really taken off.
“Including ElevenLabs, nobody was looking at voice AI, literally nobody wanted to pay (them). No VCs actually wanted to back ElevenLabs in the early pre-seed rounds. So those are industries that I really like, so I can get in front of everybody else,” he said.
Rena has made 74 angel investments over the past eight years, including Revolut, Volumetric, Elroy Air and Speckle. He now works as a go-to-market manager for Eleven Labs.
He said he always tries to identify industries that other investors don’t pay attention to: “I’ve done (invested) mostly in AI before it was sexy. I’ve also done robotics before it was sexy.”
The number 1 feature to look for in founders
Reina specializes in investing in pre-seed companies – those with an idea, but often without a fully developed product. This means identifying key characteristics in founders that indicate a startup will be successful.
“If there’s a product, fantastic, but if there’s no product, that’s totally fine with me … I like founders who are very technical. They’re very sharp, very smart, trying to build a global company literally from day one,” explained Reina.
He said he “invests based on thesis,” so if a founder is very technical, they have a deep understanding of the product and the market they’re selling.
Reina said he saw these traits in Staniszewski, which convinced him to pursue Eleven Labs even though the voice AI market was still very small at the time.
“No one wants to talk to AI voices if they sound robotic. That’s basically the biggest problem that was right there… So when I spoke to Matti, he talked about both elements and he wasn’t in the market,” Reena said.
“It was really interesting to see that he was thinking about the problems of the whole ecosystem before there was any product or before he had actually talked to any real potential customer.”
Stanizewski had a background in mathematics, a first class honors degree from Imperial College London. His vision and technical expertise sold Reina, and ElevenLabs became one of the few startups he decided to back “literally in less than an hour.”
Now, Eleven Labs plans global expansion, including building new hubs in Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico, as well as preparing the company for an IPO in the next five years. Staniszewski told CNBC In July.
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