How ElevenLabs Proves Schumpeter Right: Creative Destruction in Voice AI
Here, at this blog, besides news and articles about the world of innovation, business, and VC, I am trying to share details about my personal life and career. So, here you are. At the beginning of July 2026, I defended my final bachelor’s thesis. There, I proved the phenomenon of creative destruction in the voice technology sector exemplified by the start-up ElevenLabs in 2022-2026. In this article, I don’t want to show the process of writing a scientific paper, but I want to share conclusions about the voice technology sector and ElevenLabs, obviously.
The Miracle or just Hard Work?
The followers of my blog know what ElevenLabs is. If you don’t, check out this article. In short, ElevenLabs is a Polish-American start-up founded by two Polish founders, Piotr Dąbkowski and Mati Staniszewski. They develop a technology that enables users to create a voice from scratch using digital software, instead of hiring voice actors. Their start-up was founded in 2022 and quickly won the hearts of top VC funds and investors. As of July 2026, they have raised a total of $781M in five rounds, and now they are the most valued Polish private company with a $11B valuation (in only four years, crazy!). Mati Staniszewski has become a constant participant of various podcasts; his face was on the cover of American Forbes in December 2025, and he became an expert in the Polish Business Council formed by the Polish Prime Minister.
One Word about Creative Destruction
Now, it will be an economic and nerdy part that may sound a little bit boring for some of you. If you are one of those, just skip it. So, creative destruction is a process in which old market structures are destroyed in favour of new, more innovative companies. This term was described by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) and developed by the Italian professor Giovanni Dosi, who exemplified that phenomenon on a market of semiconductors in 80’s.
Schumpeter sees it as a process that won’t be at an equilibrium point. The companies compete and try to be more innovative. The real innovators take the greatest advantage of being first – they have a temporary monopoly. The innovation spreads, and that process is called technology diffusion. The followers get less market share. Second, a more modern approach was described by Giovanni Dosi from Italy. The game resembles a natural situation. Companies are trying to become increasingly innovative, and the weakest go bankrupt or become extinct.
The Voice Technology Sector
I am aware that it may sound a little bit abstract. The process of voice generation was not time- and cost-effective until recently. Due to the huge technological advancements in artificial intelligence and data analysis, that process has dropped from a few hours to only a few seconds. The company ElevenLabs was not the first in the field, but the story starts from an R&D centre, DeepMind (later acquired by Google), in 2016. They built a voice engine that unfortunately was not effective. Here, the proper story of Mati, Piotr, and, of course, their ElevenLabs starts.
The Founders of ElevenLabs
Let’s look closely at the founders of ElevenLabs.
Mati Staniszewski
He started from Warsaw, where in high school he met a co-founder of 11Labs – Piotr Dąbkowski. Next, he studied mathematics at Imperial College London. He worked at Opera Software and in the world-recognized investment bank BlackRock.
At Palantir, he was in charge of machine learning. In London in 2022, he founded a start-up, ElevenLabs. His connections with the biggest VCs (Sequoia, A16Z) helped to scale their venture. In 2025, he became a board member at Klarna and a member of the Polish Business Council.
Piotr Dąbkowski
A friend of Mati from Warsaw. He studied at the University of Cambridge (Advanced Computer Science) and at Oxford (Engineering). He was associated with Opera, Google, and Tessian. Now, a CTO (a real mastermind) at ElevenLabs.
The Market Leader
ElevenLabs serves millions of users globally, spanning individual creators, developers, and enterprises across more than 60% of Fortune 500 companies. What factors allowed them to reach this leadership position
Effective organisational structure
At the beginning, ElevenLabs was a start-up with a thin structure and a low number of employees. Not only did it reduce costs, but it also provided high flexibility to customize business models. The company is based on small, independent, and specialized teams created to work on specific tasks. Moreover, Mati personally hires specialists to get to know them and their attitude.
Investments
ElevenLabs, in contrast to big companies, builds its advantage on innovations by investing in research and development activities. In November 2024, the company announced that they are going to invest $11M in opening an R&D centre in Warsaw (Poland) and personnel training in India. What’s interesting is that two countries, Poland and India, have developed and high-educated workforce. Don’t believe? The photo below presents OpenAI’s crew.
One-third of these people come from Poland. It’s not an accident, but the real proof that Polish scientists are becoming more and more well-regarded. India? Here you are. Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Arvind Krishna, Neal Mohan – do you know these names? They are CEOs of big, world-recognized companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and YouTube.
The ethical monetisation
The system conducted by scientists from ElevenLabs caused a revolution in the voice sector. From that moment, you do not have to hire an extra voice actor to record a short music clip. Due to ElevenLabs, it’s much easier to create a personalized voice recording in a few seconds. In the long term, it may lead to a declining number of jobs for voice actors, and finally their services will be regarded as premium. In the future, there will be competition, and they will have to stand out by offering the highest quality of services and having a strong personal brand.
Moving to the point, ElevenLabs also takes care of the artists who got an extra opportunity to the “Voice Marketplace”, in which they can monetise their own unique voice. The best well-paid creators make approx. $4K monthly. A feedback loop mechanism operates here. The more voice actors share their voices, the more opportunities users have, which in turn generates more data for model training, and the quality of the services offered increases. Everyone seems to be satisfied – the end user, voice actors, and of course, creators of ElevenLabs.
Startup Grants
Through its Startup Grants program, ElevenLabs offers emerging enterprises 33M free tokens (roughly 600 hours of Conversational AI compute). This isn’t just goodwill; it’s a smart growth trick. By integrating early-stage startups directly into their API ecosystem, ElevenLabs builds high switching costs and ensures long-term customer retention as those startups scale.
Conclusion
Looking at ElevenLabs through the lens of Schumpeterian economics, it becomes clear that their success is no coincidence. They didn’t just build a superior model; they recognized a market shift early, scaled through lean execution, and locked in distribution with strategic API incentives and ethical monetization.
By replacing slow, legacy voice production workflows with near-instantaneous AI pipelines, ElevenLabs embodied pure creative destruction. As synthetic voice tech becomes ambient across global software, the question is no longer whether traditional audio production will be disrupted, it already has been. The real question is how fast the next wave of innovators will use these exact tools to disrupt the disruptors.
