The 2022-founded company said its AI agents now handle more than 15m customer service conversations per week.

UK-based AI voice start-up ElevenLabs has closed a $300m employee tender offer that values the company at $22bn.

The tender, led by Wellington and T Rowe Price, puts ElevenLabs’ valuation at double that from a February Series D raise of $500m, participants in which included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq.

The company’s aims are “to build AI that is intuitive and trusted in everyday interactions with people” while also understanding context and interacting “naturally in any setting”.

“AI should interact with people the way we interact with each other,” said Mati Staniszewski, the start-up’s co-founder and CEO.

“Getting this right will help ensure AI diffuses widely across the economy, and everyone is able to shape and benefit from it, regardless of technical skill.

“We’re already seeing rapid adoption of expressive voice agents by enterprises and governments, who are deploying them in service of consumers and citizens.”

The 2022-founded company said its AI agents now handle more than 15m conversations per week in aid of resolving issues such as handling refunds and exchanges, renewing insurance policies, upgrading phone plans, booking healthcare appointments and accessing public services.

Its clients include Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, Admiral, and the governments of Greece and Ukraine. ElevenLabs’ technology is used in daily operations at five of the world’s 10 largest tech companies, five of the 10 largest insurers, and four of the 10 largest telecoms providers, it said.

“As ElevenLabs has grown its conversational agent business, the combination of research, product and deployment has proved an important structural advantage,” said Emma Norchet of T Rowe Price.

The AI start-up, which employs around 800 people, offers three primary platforms in total: agentic customer services AI; a creative tool to generate and edit audio, imagery and video; and an API for developers to access its models.

A tender offer lets employees and existing shareholders sell stocks to investors to provide liquidity without necessarily ​raising any new capital.

As part of the tender process, EQT, Goldman Sachs, GIC, OTPP, Sapphire Ventures and BDT & MSD invested in ElevenLabs for the first time, alongside existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Iconiq, DE Shaw, Evantic, Diruptive and Alkeon.

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