Who are ElevenLabs's decision-makers?

Mati Staniszewski serves as CEO and is the primary public face of ElevenLabs. Before co-founding the company, he worked at Palantir Technologies as a deployment strategist, embedding with enterprises and governments to implement large-scale technology systems — a background directly reflected in ElevenLabs's enterprise land-and-expand go-to-market. He also helped launch BlackRock's Aladdin Wealth platform, giving him experience operating within the large financial enterprise environment. As of March 2026, he has publicly committed to IPO readiness within two to three years and is discussing a dual listing on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, which would make ElevenLabs one of the most prominent European-founded AI companies to go public.

Piotr Dabkowski is CTO and leads all AI research. A former Google machine learning engineer who also worked at Opera Software and Tessian, he is responsible for ElevenLabs's core voice models (currently Eleven v3) and the real-time inference infrastructure that powers sub-200ms conversational AI agents. His leadership on the Google Cloud partnership — announced in February 2026, awarding ElevenLabs access to GCP G4 virtual machines with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs — reflects a conviction that vertical integration with the leading hardware generation is the primary source of quality and latency advantage in AI voice.

Below the founders, Carles Reina (VP Sales/Revenue) is the most publicly visible executive. He joined as the fourth employee and early investor, building the sales organization from zero to $500M+ ARR in approximately three years. His 20VC podcast interview is one of the most cited resources on ElevenLabs's go-to-market philosophy, detailing the expansion-first motion and targeting 20x ACV growth on initial contracts. His publicly stated compensation plan weights heavily on net revenue retention, aligning the entire sales team around expanding existing accounts rather than pure new logo acquisition.

ElevenLabs purchases fall across three distinct buyer archetypes depending on the product category and deal size. For self-serve and API tooling, individual engineers, content leads, or product managers sign up independently with a credit card — no procurement involvement. Deals up to approximately $50K annual value typically flow through technical champions without a formal buying committee.

For enterprise platform contracts — ElevenAgents deployments, VPC configurations, multi-language dubbing pipelines, and annual API commitments — the buying committee typically includes a VP of Engineering or VP of Product as technical champion, a VP of Customer Experience or VP of Operations as the business sponsor, and CFO or VP Finance as the financial approver. Carles Reina and the VP Revenue team own enterprise pipeline development and initial negotiations; founders engage directly on strategic accounts and large renewals above a certain ACV threshold.

For strategic partnerships of the type ElevenLabs has executed with Google Cloud, Deutsche Telekom, and Santander, C-suite engagement directly with Mati Staniszewski is required. These deals tend to involve investor-customer overlap (Deutsche Telekom and Santander invested in the Series D third close) and are governed by multi-year MSA structures with embedded expansion commitments. Sellers targeting ElevenLabs as a customer account should map entry point to deal size: engineering and developer tools to Tim von Känel (VP Backend Engineering); operational and workplace vendors to Victoria W. (VP Operations); revenue and sales tools to Carles Reina; and strategic partnership discussions to Mati Staniszewski directly.

ElevenLabs operates with deliberately lean headcount relative to its revenue scale. At roughly 600+ employees generating $500M ARR, the company produces approximately $833K in ARR per employee — significantly above the SaaS median for companies at equivalent revenue. This reflects the API-first and product-led growth base that converts at scale without a proportionally large sales team.

The company has three confirmed offices: New York (primary HQ at 40 Crosby Street, SoHo), London (European HQ, opened 2024; UK headcount grew from 18 to 68 employees in a single year), and Warsaw (founding city, R&D center, and primary EU engineering hub where both founders have roots). Series D capital allocates budget for embedded GTM teams in 13+ additional cities through 2026 and 2027, likely prioritizing San Francisco, Bangalore, Singapore, Tokyo, and major European capitals based on existing enterprise customer concentrations.

As the company moves toward IPO readiness, the VP of Finance role under Maciej Mylik becomes increasingly central. Pre-IPO preparation at this stage typically involves transitioning to GAAP revenue recognition, implementing SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance infrastructure, and building out investor relations capabilities. The $100M employee tender offer completed in February 2026 is a standard pre-IPO liquidity mechanism and suggests the company's financial team is actively executing the pre-public playbook.