Carles Reyna, GTM Manager at Eleven Labs, explained why he invested in an AI company.
eleven lab
An angel investor who backed the multibillion-dollar AI startup in its early stages said he decided to invest in the company just 30 minutes after meeting one of the founders.
Carles Reyna first decided to invest in AI voice startup Eleven Labs in 2022 when he was a venture partner at pre-seed fund Concept Ventures.
Co-founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, Eleven Labs specializes in advanced text-to-speech and voice cloning technology. Earlier this year, the company raised $180 million in a Series C funding round in January at a valuation of $3.3 billion.
And in September, the company announced it would force employees to sell stock valued at $6.6 billion.
But before Eleven Labs could create a tangible product, Reyna, who was working at Palantir Technologies at the time, decided to give the company a chance after meeting Staniszewski.
“I met Matty when he was still at Palantir,” Reyna said in an interview with CNBC Make It. “We started talking, and within 30 minutes of our first conversation, I said to him, ‘How much money do you want?’
Reina explained that voice AI didn’t get a lot of attention before ChatGPT’s launch because big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were all developing text-to-speech products, but they weren’t really widespread.
“At Eleven Labs, no one was paying attention to voice AI, and literally no one was willing to give[them]any money. In the early days of the pre-seed round, there were no VCs that actually wanted to back Eleven Labs. So these are the types of industries that I really like, so we can get in there before everyone else,” he said.
Reina has made 74 angel investments over the past eight years, including Revolut, Volumetric, Elroy Air, and Speckle. He currently works as a Market Development Manager at Eleven Labs.
He said he always tries to identify industries that other investors aren’t paying attention to. “I’ve primarily (invested) in AI before it became attractive. I’ve done robotics before it became attractive,” he said.
The No. 1 characteristic that founders should look out for
Reyna specializes in investing in pre-seed companies – companies that have an idea but whose product is not fully developed. This means identifying key characteristics of founders that indicate a successful startup.
“If you have a product, great, but if you don’t have a product, that’s totally fine with me…I love very technical founders. They’re very sharp, very smart, and they’re literally trying to build a global company from day one,” Reyna explained.
He said he “invests based on theory,” so if the founders are very technical, they will have a better understanding of the product and the market they are selling to.
Mr. Reyna said that he saw these characteristics in Mr. Staniszevsi and was convinced to support ElevenLabs, even though the voice AI market was very small at the time.
“No one is going to want to talk to an AI voice if it sounds like a robot. Fundamentally that was the biggest problem, and it was right… So when I talked to Matty, he talked about both elements, but he wasn’t on the market yet,” Reyna said.
“It was really interesting to see him think about the overall ecosystem issues before he actually had the product or before he actually talked to potential customers.”
Staniszewski has a background in mathematics and obtained a first class honors degree from Imperial College London. His vision and technical expertise sold Reyna, and Eleven Labs became one of the few startups he decided to back “literally within an hour.”
Eleven Labs is currently planning global expansion, including building new hubs in Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico, and preparing for an IPO within the next five years, Staniszewski told CNBC in July.
