ElevenLabs could start preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2028, chief executive Mati Staniszewski said on Tuesday. He spoke to Bloomberg's Tom Mackenzie at the Bloomberg Tech event in London, as Yazhou Sun reported for Bloomberg.

“We'd love to IPO, build a public company, build that step in a longer journey. IPO of course is not an end in itself. It's a step in the journey,” Staniszewski said.

ElevenLabs, founded in 2022, makes voice and audio models. They power AI agents for sales and call centres, narrate audiobooks and translate adverts into other languages. Its valuation doubled to $22bn this year in a share sale for staff.

In September, the company hired OpenAI's Ashley Kramer as its first chief revenue officer.

Human or AI

Staniszewski expects people to assume they are talking to AI in business settings within three to five years.

“Today you assume that you're interacting with a human unless it's proven to be AI. In the future I think it will be the opposite,” he said.

ElevenLabs competes with Alibaba's open-source Qwen model, which can generate speech and clone voices, Bloomberg reported. It also faces US rivals such as Fish Audio, based in Palo Alto.

The ElevenLabs IPO talk comes as investors question the returns on AI spending, which has weighed on share prices, Bloomberg noted. AI companies are under pressure to show they can make money.