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Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive announced a $10 billion fund on Tuesday, planning checks of up to $1 billion each for at least 10 late-stage companies in AI and defense. The fund is the firm's first blind-pool vehicle, meaning investors commit capital without knowing in advance which startups will receive it, a shift from its prior deal-by-deal approach.
Andreessen Horowitz partner Olivia Moore released a report ranking the top 100 consumer AI apps, finding ChatGPT remains dominant while smaller apps like Suno and ElevenLabs retain strong usage. The report also identifies several consumer categories that remain largely untouched by AI products. In an interview, Moore argued consumer AI's revenue model needs to move beyond subscriptions and API fees to find new monetization paths.
A poster on Hacker News describes searching for a commercial AI model that accepts both a reference sound and a text prompt to generate new audio, similar to how image models use reference images plus prompts. They report trying ElevenLabs' text-to-SFX tool and Stable Audio 3, saying neither handled reference audio well or produced accurate results for their sound-effect generation use case.
Suno has released Speech, a public beta feature on its web and mobile apps that generates spoken voiceovers alongside background music as a single track. Users can create audio via a Simple mode, describing a scene in a prompt, or an Advanced mode that accepts a custom script and lets them adjust voice gender, style and variation; background music can also be toggled off.
ElevenLabs completed a $300 million tender offer letting employees sell vested shares at a $22 billion valuation, double the $11 billion mark it hit in February when it raised $500 million. The sale was co-led by institutional investors Wellington and T. Rowe Price, and marks the company's second such secondary transaction after a $100 million tender at $6.6 billion in September 2025.
ElevenLabs released two new speech models, v4 and v4 Turbo, adding expanded expression control, faster voice cloning from just 10 seconds of audio, and support for over 90 languages, up from 70. The company said quality improved most notably in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin and Cantonese, and the new models offer lower latency aimed at voice agent applications.
In an interview at the Nrth conference in Toronto, ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski discussed the AI voice company's growth, saying it is pacing at $600 million in annual recurring revenue and is reportedly valued at $22 billion by investors, four years after founding. He said the company powers phone support for clients including Klarna, Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, and Adobe, and increasingly competes with businesses that once trained on its technology, such as Decagon.
ElevenLabs has released Music v2.5 as the new default model in ElevenMusic, improving audio quality with richer melodies and more natural instrument sounds across genres. Users on all plans, including Free, now own the rights to tracks they create, and can download lossless copies—five daily for Free users and 400 monthly for Pro subscribers. Tracks that reference other artists' songs are blocked from download to protect original creators.
Universal Music Group and ElevenLabs unveiled a multi-year licensing agreement and broader partnership to build a new AI-powered music platform, separate from ElevenLabs' existing ElevenMusic tool. The unreleased platform will let fans create remixes, mashups, new track interpretations and personalized vocal experiences using catalog from participating UMG artists, who will be compensated under the deal.
Universal Music Group announced a multi-year licensing deal with ElevenLabs to build an AI-powered platform letting users create remixes and reinterpretations of songs from UMG's catalog. The companies say the partnership will expand over time to include additional AI products and fan experiences beyond the initial platform. This new offering will operate separately from ElevenLabs' existing Music API and ElevenMusic tools.
Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-to-text model it says beats OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on speed, accuracy and cost, pricing it at 10 cents per audio hour—a 72% cut from the $0.36 rate it charged for its first model just five months ago. The new version supports 60 languages, up from 43, and adds built-in speaker diarization and word-level timestamps, targeting noisy real-world business audio rather than clean recordings.