ElevenLabs CEO: tell callers it's a bot, for now
At a $22B valuation and $600M ARR, ElevenLabs' CEO says voice AI disclosure should happen today. Here's how to wire it into your phone agent.
The CEO of the largest voice AI company says you should tell your customers when they're talking to a machine. Mati Staniszewski sat for a twenty-minute interview with TechCrunch at the Nrth conference in Toronto on September 24, at a reported $22 billion valuation. His position on voice AI disclosure was plain: "there should be disclosure at this time," even if that norm loosens in five years as synthetic voices become ordinary.
What actually happened
ElevenLabs is at $600 million in annual recurring revenue. Enterprise is 55%-plus of the business; the remaining 45% is small and mid-sized businesses, developers and creators. That second bucket is the one most readers of this post live in — and it is large enough that the company is clearly not treating SMB voice agents as a side experiment.
Two other answers are worth your attention. On gross margins, Staniszewski declined specifics but said that if the company can invest and prove the value, "we don't mind the margins going lower" to benefit customers. On the widely reported 2028 IPO: "We are preparing the foundation to be able to do it in the next years. But whether we do it will depend on the time and place." He also described custom government deployments for Poland and Brazil, built around data residency requirements and local model preferences.
Why voice AI disclosure matters for your business
Read the margin comment twice. A vendor that is relaxed about margin compression is a vendor planning to compete on price to take share — good news for your per-minute cost, and a reminder that the pricing you signed is not the pricing that will exist in eighteen months.
The disclosure answer is the operational one. When the category leader says disclose, that is the direction regulators will be pointed toward, and it is already the law in some places. Build it in now and it costs you a sentence. Retrofit it after a complaint and it costs you a scramble.
Concretely: the disclosure belongs in the first turn of the greeting, before the caller states their problem — not buried in a terms page. Give the agent a hard handoff path to a human on request, and log the transfer. Keep a recording-consent line that matches your state's rules; Arizona is one-party, plenty of your customers are not. And write your greeting copy yourself. The default script that ships with every voice platform is how you end up sounding like every other business that bought the same platform.
We have run a front desk. Disclosing the bot has never cost a booking. Sounding like a bot while pretending not to be one absolutely has.
Key takeaways
- ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski says customers should be told when they're speaking with an AI agent today
- The company is at $600M ARR and a reported $22B valuation; enterprise is 55%+ of revenue, SMB/dev/creator the rest
- He declined margin specifics but said "we don't mind the margins going lower" to win customers — expect per-minute price pressure
- On a 2028 IPO: foundations are being laid, but no commitment to timing
- Put the disclosure in the first turn of the greeting, not in a terms page
- Give callers a logged, one-request path to a human, and match recording consent to the caller's state, not yours
A phone agent that answers honestly and books the job. We build voice and chat agents with disclosure, human handoff and consent logging wired in from the first call — and scripts written for your business, not lifted from a vendor template. See what we've shipped, or tell us what your front desk misses after hours.
Sources: TechCrunch: Twenty minutes with the CEO of ElevenLabs.
- #voice-ai
- #elevenlabs
- #ai-disclosure
- #ai-agents
- #compliance
Tommy Rush — Founder, Rush Commerce
Operator turned builder. 15+ years running operations — now shipping the systems businesses run on. More
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