EU’s €5B Scaleup Europe Fund in talks to back ElevenLabs’ $500M raise
Tech Funding News Abhinaya Prabhu
EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund is in talks to join ElevenLabs’ next raise. The voice AI startup wants over $500M, and Europe’s trying to keep late-stage capital closer to home.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Abhinaya Prabhu — read the original for the full story.
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ElevenLabs may be heading back to the fundraising table faster than most startups can finish a board deck. The voice AI company, which raised $500 million in February at an $11 billion valuation, is now seeking more than $500 million again, and Bloomberg says the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund is in early talks to participate.
That fund is not a random visitor. It’s a €5 billion vehicle managed by EQT and backed by the European Commission, Allianz, APG, Novo Holdings, CriteriaCaixa and Santander’s Mouro Capital. It launched this year with a blunt mission: help Europe’s biggest private tech companies avoid having to lean on American money when they need to scale.
Scaleup Europe has already shown it is willing to move fast. It has backed ICEYE’s €1 billion Series F, Lovable’s $400 million round at a $13.3 billion valuation, Mistral AI’s €3 billion Series D and, just this month, Tandem Health’s $100 million Series B. But on ElevenLabs, nothing is done. Both sides declined to comment, and people close to the talks say there is no guarantee a deal lands.
The startup’s rise has been unusually sharp even by AI standards. Founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, who met as teenagers in Warsaw, ElevenLabs moved from $1.1 billion after its $80 million Series B in January 2024 to $3.3 billion a year later, then to $11 billion in February with a Series D led by Sequoia Capital. Bloomberg also reported in July that the company was already exploring a secondary sale at roughly $22 billion.
Poland is treating the company like a national project. In June, the state development bank’s Vinci fund bought an $11 million stake and used it to launch AI Lab Poland, a programme meant to build the country’s next AI company, not just celebrate this one. Staniszewski has said he wants ElevenLabs IPO-ready within two to three years, and the business is widening beyond voice cloning into dubbing, conversational agents and audio tools. It’s also aiming to grow annual recurring revenue from $350 million at the end of 2025 to more than $500 million in the first four months of 2026.
Meanwhile, the money pile in voice AI keeps getting larger. Nvidia has backed Gradium’s seed extension, pushing the Paris startup past $100 million, while OpenAI, Google and Microsoft already have their own voice products in market. The fight is no longer about whether voice AI exists. It’s about who gets to own the layer on top.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is Europe finally acting like it wants to keep its crown jewels at home, which is nice after years of watching them tour San Francisco for capital. The real test is whether Scaleup Europe can move like a serious late-stage investor and not just a very expensive press release with a flag on it. If it can, good. If not, ElevenLabs will keep doing what the best European startups have always done: shop where the money is.
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