ElevenLabs opens its Singapore hub with 25 staff

ElevenLabs, the AI voice company valued at $22 billion, opened its Singapore regional headquarters on October 8, 2026, and is hiring across engineering, go-to-market and marketing, starting from a local team of 25 employees who have been working remotely.

Co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski told The Straits Times in an interview published October 9 that the company wants to tap Singapore's research and engineering talent. He declined to commit to a hiring target, but said the office could reach 100 employees within a few years. The new roles include forward-deployed engineers, who work alongside enterprise clients to build their own voice agents.

The office opened three months after ElevenLabs began hosting its core models on Singapore-based infrastructure. The company launched Singapore data residency in July 2026, a setup it says gives enterprise customers local hosting, zero-retention options and lower latency across Singapore and East Asia. In its launch post, ElevenLabs said Southeast Asia is one of the most linguistically diverse and mobile-first populations on earth.

"The way we communicate is hyperlocal, and nowhere is that clearer than Singapore," Staniszewski said in that post. "What matters for people and businesses here is AI that's built and refined for their country, their languages, and their context."

At the October 8 launch, Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information Tan Kiat How said voice agents help people, especially seniors, avoid navigating menus or writing text prompts. He said the adoption of synthetic voices must come with public trust, and called the local hosting significant for data residency, security and latency requirements, according to The Straits Times.

The launch lands after a sharp jump in the company's private-market value. ElevenLabs said on September 30, 2026 that it closed a $300 million employee tender offer at a $22 billion valuation, double the $11 billion it reached after a $500 million Series D in February 2026. The tender was co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price, TechCrunch reported. ElevenLabs said enterprise customers now account for 55% of its revenue, and that its agents handle more than 15 million conversations a week, three times the level in February.

The company said in July that it had passed $600 million in global annual recurring revenue, more than half of it from enterprise customers including Meta, Salesforce, Stripe and Revolut, The Straits Times reported. ElevenLabs names regional customers including Funding Societies, Atome, AI Rudder, Rezonate and Level3AI, along with Malaysia's Boost Bank, the Philippines' Salmon Group and Indonesia's MNC Group. It competes with voice agent makers including Wiz.AI, Instadesk, Google and Amazon.

The Singapore hub is part of a wider build-out. ElevenLabs has said it plans to expand across London, New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Dublin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bengaluru, Sydney, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris and Mexico City, and its careers page lists 130 open positions across 54 locations. The company, founded in 2022, has raised about $781 million across five rounds.

In September 2026, ElevenLabs launched Eleven v4, a text-to-speech model that supports more than 90 languages, including Malay, Tamil and Mandarin, and adds emotion controls through inline audio tags. Staniszewski told The Straits Times that ElevenLabs plans to train its models on Singlish, citing local phrases such as "can leh" and "can lor" that look similar but carry different meanings. The company has not given a date for that work.

For video creators, the Asia build-out matters because dubbing and narration are the parts of the pipeline that have to sound native in each market. Local infrastructure in Singapore shortens the round trip for real-time voice agents and keeps inference data inside the region, which could matter for clients with data-residency rules. Eleven v4's emotion and accent controls already target dubbing, and a model that handles Singlish well would remove one more reason to re-record localized audio by hand. Whether Singlish support reaches the product is not yet scheduled.

ElevenLabs lists open roles in Singapore and its other hubs on its careers page; Staniszewski has said the company aims to have the groundwork for a public listing in place by 2028, a timeline he gave CNBC-TV18.