ElevenLabs bets big on India with $100 million revenue goal, major hiring push

ElevenLabs is aiming to cross $100 million in revenue from India while ramping up hiring and deepening local partnerships, underscoring the country’s emergence as one of the fastest-growing markets for AI voice technology.

“The goal is passing $100 million in revenues in India alone, hiring 100 people in India alone and doing it very soon,” Carles Reina, who leads go-to-market at ElevenLabs and is also an angel investor, said in an interview with Business Today. 

Reina added that the hiring will span multiple functions as the company scales enterprise deployments across sectors. “We’re hiring all across the engineering space, go to market side, research, all of that stuff,” he said. 

The expansion comes as ElevenLabs sees India rapidly becoming a core market. The country is already its second-largest enterprise market globally, driven by demand from banking, e-commerce, telecom and technology firms.

“We had the first team on the ground two years ago, and what we have seen is very quickly became the second biggest market from an enterprise perspective,” Reina said. 

Local strategy, global ambitions

Earlier in January, the company appointed Karthik Rajaram as General Manager and Country Head for India to lead go-to-market strategy and revenue growth while building partnerships across enterprise and media sectors. The move reflects ElevenLabs’ push to operate as what Reina described as a “global hyper-local company.”

“It is actually an India company servicing India customers,” he said, noting that the firm has local pricing, dedicated teams and India-specific datasets covering multiple languages. 

The India team also serves Southeast Asia, highlighting the country’s role as a regional hub for expansion.

Enterprise traction across industries

Globally, ElevenLabs counts major corporations such as Cisco, Epic Games, Adobe and NVIDIA among its clients. In India, its local go-to-market team has partnered with companies including Meesho, Apna, 99acres, TVS Motor, Mahindra and PocketFM to deploy voice agents for customer engagement and support at scale.

The technology is particularly attractive to businesses handling large volumes of calls or multilingual interactions, a common challenge in India’s diverse market.

Reina said the company’s focus on emotionally expressive voices and low-latency responses differentiates it from cheaper alternatives. Flat-sounding AI systems often fail to retain users, he noted.

“When a person gets a call and realises it’s interacting with an AI agent that sounds like a robot, the first thing they say is, ‘I need to talk to a human,’” he said, adding that ElevenLabs aims to avoid that outcome. 

On competition from Indian startups

Reina said the rise of homegrown AI players, including companies such as Sarvam AI, has intensified competition but argued that superior research and user experience will determine long-term success.

“I think it’s fundamentally on the quality of the research that we have,” he said.

He drew a distinction between basic voice models and systems designed for human-like interaction at enterprise scale. “A model that is okay, anyone can deliver it… That doesn’t mean that people are going to be engaged and feel emotionally connected to those voices,” Reina said. 

Price competition alone, he suggested, is unlikely to be decisive in India’s cost-sensitive market. “You can go and build a very local team… lower the pricing by 10x if you want,” he said. “But if still the experience is bad and no one wants to talk to those voices, you’re not going to have any level of ROI.”

Investing despite automation fears

The hiring push comes even as AI automation raises concerns about job losses in sectors such as call centers.

Reina dismissed the notion that AI growth must come at the expense of employment, arguing that investment now will unlock future opportunities.

“I do believe that the opportunity in India is very large,” he told Business Today. “India has a very large, well-educated population that is extremely good from a technical perspective.” 

He added that failing to invest early could limit the technology’s potential. “If we don’t invest today, we’re not going to be able to tap the entire potential,” he said. 

Beyond profits

Alongside commercial expansion, ElevenLabs is also rolling out social initiatives such as an “Impact Programme” aimed at helping people who have lost their voices regain the ability to communicate through AI.

Earlier this week, the company partnered with Bridging Voice and The Scott-Morgan Foundation, to launch an initiative to help remove communication barriers for those affected by Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Motor Neuron Disease (MND). "We're giving free access to our voice cloning and text-to-speech technology to ALS/MND patients who have lost or are at risk of losing their ability to speak," the company had announced. 

“There are elements where it’s all about making money… and there are elements about giving back to society,” Reina said. 

India as a strategic battleground

India’s vast population, linguistic diversity and booming digital economy make it a key battleground for AI companies building voice-first systems. 

“We want to cover all of the 22 official languages… and go deeper into variations,” Reina said, describing it as essential to reaching the country’s entire population.