ElevenLabs is named after its founders' lucky number

ElevenLabs, the voice-AI company whose synthetic voices now read audiobooks, dub films and answer phones, was founded in 2022 by two Polish school friends, Piotr Dąbkowski and Mati Staniszewski. The idea came from their frustration with Polish television dubbing, where one flat voice reads every character.

Asked where the name came from, Staniszewski said they first tried things like SpeechLab and VoiceLab, but none was big enough for what they wanted to build. So they went for something more open, and arrived at eleven, “which has always been our lucky number”. It matters in mathematics, it turns up all over popular culture, and it happens to look right: two straight lines side by side, just like the pause sign on a player. If everything ends up being read aloud one day, he says, that sign will be everywhere.

In a short talk (in Polish) he goes through the rest of eleven’s record, and it reads like a page of this site: Apollo 11, the amplifier in This Is Spinal Tap that goes up to eleven, and the eleventh of November, Poland’s Independence Day.

And the number has done well by them. ElevenLabs has grown into one of the most valuable companies Polish founders have ever built: in February 2026, after a $500 million round led by Sequoia, ElevenLabs was valued at eleven billion dollars. Eleven billion, for a company called Eleven.