across all the people that lost their voice. All of that to be able to bring that voice back, get their voice back with AI and communicate again.
In the future, what we think will happen, you will have different models for different parts of the conversation.
Or let's say it's a sale and now the emotionality, the EQ part, the emotional intelligence matters even more than the IQ part. When we started the company, the highest usage, the highest pickup, the highest set of new use cases came from India. Our clear focus is building that interaction platform for all the companies out there to make that step easy.
Thank you so much, Mati, for speaking to Economic Times once again. And I want to quickly begin this conversation by asking you that, you know, a lot has been rapidly changing in the world of AI. I think you've just raised a funding round of $300 million, doubling your valuation within eight months to $22 billion. Talk to us a little bit about the overall plans of ElevenLabs when it comes to expansion, when it comes to investment, R&D. Talk to us a little bit about how you see the space developing from your lens.
I think you need three pieces as you think about our work generally as a company: you need great research, you need a great product, and a great deployment and ecosystem. And we are investing on all the fronts to work together with the people here. So on the first one, on the research, it's you need to build truly local models. We just released our new generation of that, V4. V4 supports 14 of Indian languages at the highest quality, so it's winning on independent benchmarks across any of the other players, and has been built in partnership with local experts, with voice coaches, with people here in the region to make sure that the model is right.
Second is the product, and that extends from data residency through the telephony systems, and working with Exotel and a number of other partners to make sure you have that telephony system available for the companies. And it needs deployment too, so you need people on the ground for deployed engineers working across. And we have an India team — of course the go-to-market — but we have deployed engineers, researchers, research engineers, all working to really bring those models into production.
And then the last piece, but an essential one, is an ecosystem, and that applies both on our wider side. So we have an ecosystem of voice talents that builds on top of ElevenLabs, part of our marketplace where you can create the voice, share and earn money on that voice. We have thousands of voices across India earning money already today on that ecosystem, and that number is expanding. We are investing more in unlocking that. And maybe last thing to just close up and why this day is special for two reasons. So one, of course, is that we are hosting the summit, but the second is that we will be signing a memorandum of understanding with the government of Karnataka, where with government we are doing three things that are so tied to the ecosystem.
One is opening pilots for a lot of the citizen support use cases, so allowing us to create voice experiences to connect with the government in an easier way. Two, helping across all the people that lost their voice due to ALS, due to cancer, all of that, to be able to bring that voice back, get their voice back with AI and communicate again. And that will be on our mission to get to a million voices, to make sure everyone who needs it has it.
And then the last one is safety. You need to develop technology, but you need to develop it safely, especially so people know when they interact with AI and when they don't. So we'll be working in partnership of trying to decide how far we are and build the mechanisms for growth. So a big day for us for that reason too. And that expands to your question: our intention is to invest in the ecosystem, not necessarily in the revenue, but also on the ways that can deliver the impact, that can deliver the additional benefit, and learn from that and deploy the technology in a better way.
Right. So using technology for good as well. Mati, let me ask you a little bit about your India plans. I think India is your second largest market, right? You've already done very well in India, having marquee partnerships, and we've spoken about it at length. Talk to us a little bit about how you are doing in India. I believe you had set a target of $100 million ARR in India. So how is that coming up?
It's going well overall as India continues to be, but it's growing very quickly, a second biggest market since last we spoke. Havells, they are automating the home, so you can speak through their app, turn up and down the AC or turn off the geyser. Now their app has 2.7 million downloads and it already is delighting people across. Then you have companies like Physics that are thinking about the future of education, where you have a personal teacher that can teach you your subject, personalized to your language, personalized to your understanding, personalized to your context in an amazing way. And then of course companies that have scaled so much, like Asper Pay or Cars24 or TVS Motor.
And that's going to be a big theme in 2027 and what I think India can lead on as well for the rest of the world: how you can really elevate a customer journey connected from support to sales to operations. And maybe a last and probably one of my favorite ones is what this means for healthcare. In healthcare you could book an appointment with a voice agent, go into the healthcare appointment, speak with a doctor. The doctor or the nurse doesn't need to now do the appointment scheduling, that's so time-consuming, they can focus on the appointment. But in that appointment all the notes can be transcribed, your prescription can be sent automatically to your account, and then two weeks later you can get a follow-up, ask how you're feeling, do you need any other medicine, and check up on you. And that piece is going to happen. That's what we would love to help solve, and India truly has an ability to lead on that and bring applied AI into the ecosystem across.
Do you see a difference in enterprise pricing in India as a market versus the US and Europe and others, considering, you know, India is a price-sensitive market and also has lower labor costs?
Yeah, no, you are right, it's of course different pricing expectations. We today try to optimize first on quality, so we want to make sure that the model is perfect across all 22 Indian languages, the official ones, and all the 122 major ones. And that's kind of the primary mission today. Already now at scale we can be extremely price efficient. That's why a lot of the companies that we spoke about already deploy that in production, because at scale the use cases we work on are extremely efficient, and we have a number of customers across regulated industries with that same pattern. So as long as we know and predict the scale, we are happy to invest economically too to make sure that this works.
Now you are still pointing to the right question, which is, in the future what does it mean and how does it look like today. Our goal is to deliver the highest quality we can at the lowest price we can. Today, the highest quality and building the leading models is at a premium to some of the other providers, but we'll be optimizing that and passing that on. And in the future, what we think will happen, you will have different models for different parts of the conversation — that applies to voice, it applies to LLM today — and we want to help orchestrate across and deliver. Okay, this is a simple conversation, an informational one where you might not need to take an action: let's say you're calling in to ask about a service, okay, a cheaper model, affordable model is fine. Let's say you get authenticated and you need to now ask about recent transactions and get the refund, okay, now you need safety, you need guardrails, you need it to be right. Or let's say it's a sale and now the emotionality, the EQ part, the emotional intelligence matters even more than the IQ part, because you need to personalize, understand social norms, understand the culture. That's at a premium because that is what the value is and what delivers value.
And across that, as we think about our mission, it is to deliver you the best models and affordable models for each part of the journey. For the first part of the journey there will be a cheap model to deliver, that's the result. When you are looking at the value-generating piece, you want the best model because that's your advantage. Combining this with the context you have is the metric, and that's what we'll do.
