Synopsis
Venture capital firm Activate has made its first global growth-stage AI investment in ElevenLabs. This New York-based voice AI company considers India a key market. Activate will partner with ElevenLabs in India to strengthen enterprise relationships and offer early-stage Indian startups access to its voice infrastructure. ElevenLabs is experiencing rapid growth, with India being its second-largest market globally.Listen to this article in summarized format
Activate declined to disclose the size of the investment, its first bet on a global growth-stage AI company since the $75-million AI-focused fund was launched last year.
As part of the arrangement, Activate will act as ElevenLabs’ on-the-ground venture partner in India, helping the company deepen its enterprise relationships and giving early-stage Indian startups preferential access to build on its voice infrastructure.
The investment has been facilitated via a separate vehicle backed by Activate’s limited partners or sponsors in the fund.
“The investment in ElevenLabs is strategic in nature as it will be a way for us to partner with them to see how we can help the voice AI startup ecosystem here,” Aakrit Vaish who set up Activate with Pratyush Choudhury, told ET.
The partnership will also help Mumbai-based Activate’s early-stage investing going forward, said Vaish, cofounder of Haptik, an enterprise AI agent platform that was acquired by Reliance Industries.
In February, Activate also announced a multi-year collaboration with Nvidia to support AI startups in the country, providing access to developer tools, technical training, compute resources and go-to-market support.
ElevenLabs' latest $500-million funding round, which closed in early February, was led by Sequoia Capital, Iconiq Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The company said it crossed annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $500 million in the first four months of 2026.
“India is one of our largest markets and one of the fastest globally to adopt voice AI,” said Mati Staniszewski, cofounder of ElevenLabs. “What stands out are the innovative ways that builders and enterprises across India are deploying the technology.”
The company said India is its second-largest market globally by revenue. Its customers include leading consumer internet, ecommerce, media and education companies, along with a rapidly growing base of developers building on its platform across multiple languages and use cases.
The voice AI space is seeing rising competition, with startups such as Wispr Flow, Bolna AI, Murf AI, Cartesia and Gnani.ai expanding their offerings across enterprise and developer use cases, especially in India.
Activate’s current fund is backed by Indian-origin billionaire Vinod Khosla, Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Ashish Vaswani (Essential AI), Dhaval Shroff (Tesla AI), Manohar Paluri (Meta), Ramesh Raskar (MIT Media Lab), Shyamal Anadkat (OpenAI), Shailendra Singh (Peak XV) and others.
