ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski said the company may begin preparing for an IPO in 2028, calling it "a step in the journey." Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs builds voice and audio models for sales and call center agents, audiobooks, and ad translation. A $300 million employee tender recently valued the firm at $22 billion, about twice its valuation from February. Staniszewski said that in three to five years, most people will expect their business interactions to involve AI, adding that "today you assume that you're interacting with a human unless it's proven to be AI" and "in the future I think it will be the opposite." Concerns about fraud and deepfakes may keep customers from granting AI agents real decision-making authority; to mitigate that risk, ElevenLabs introduced a synthetic-voice detector that spots telltale signals in real-time audio to judge if a caller is a person or an AI system, aimed at government bodies that lack the tooling to cope with a wave of AI agents hitting their services. ElevenLabs faces Alibaba's open-sourced Qwen model, which includes speech generation and voice cloning, and U.S. rivals such as Palo Alto-based Fish Audio.