ElevenLabs will probably be worth more than Twilio by mid-2026

Really seems like a missed opportunity there

— Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) January 13, 2026

ElevenLabs is on track to match Twilio’s market cap in under 5 years from founding. Here’s what that tells us about the new rules of B2B in the Age of AI

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ElevenLabs Rockets to $330,000,000 ARR

ElevenLabs growth:

– 0->$100M ARR: 20 months

– $100M -> $200M ARR: 10 months

– $200M -> $330M ARR: 5 months

All powered by incredible customers – and their impact. https://t.co/XjO6oZR7ck

— Mati Staniszewski (@matiii) January 13, 2026

ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski recently tweeted out the company crossed $330 million in ARR at year-end 2025.

But it’s the speed, pace and raw acceleration that is most impressive:

• 20 months to reach $100M ARR

• 10 months to reach $200M ARR

• 5 months to reach $330M ARR

That’s not just triple-triple-double-double. That’s acceleration within hypergrowth. The time to add each $100M compressing, not expanding.

For context: Twilio—the original developer-first communications API company—took roughly 8 years to hit that same $330M mark (they crossed it around 2019, having been founded in 2008).  And it was one of the fastest growing developer platforms of all time — of its era.

A Tale of Two Communications Platforms

Let’s put these two companies side by side. Both are fundamentally in the same business: making it easy for developers to add voice and communications to their applications.

Metric

ElevenLabs

Twilio

Founded

2022

2008

Age

3.5 years

18 years

ARR/Revenue

$330M ARR

~$5B annual revenue

Valuation/Market Cap

$6.6B (private)

~$20B (public)

Revenue Multiple

20x

4x

Growth Rate

~265% YoY

12-15% YoY

Profitability

Not disclosed

$900M+ Non-GAAP Op Income

Customers

41% of Fortune 500

392,000+ accounts

The valuation gap is closing fast. If ElevenLabs hits a $13B valuation in 1H 2026 (as market whispers suggest) and $20B by 2H 2026, it will have matched Twilio’s market cap in under 5 years from founding.

Twilio took a decade post-IPO to reach a $20B valuation sustainably—and briefly touched $75B during the 2021 bubble before a brutal 73% correction.

The Growth Curves Tell the Story

ElevenLabs: Escape Velocity

The company’s funding trajectory reads like a venture capital fever dream:

• Jun 2023: $100M valuation (Series A led by a16z)

• Jan 2024: $1.1B valuation (Series B — unicorn status)

• Jan 2025: $3.3B valuation (Series C co-led by a16z + ICONIQ)

• Sep 2025: $6.6B valuation (Secondary round)

• 1H 2026: $13B (projected)

• 2H 2026: $20B (projected)

That’s a 66x increase in valuation in 2.5 years (from Series A to secondary). And they’re not just raising at higher prices—they’re shipping product that enterprises are actually paying for at scale.

The Bloomberg interview revealed that Fortune 500 companies and startups alike are deploying ElevenLabs’ voice agent technology, with enterprises handling more than 50,000 calls per month on the platform.

Twilio: The Incumbent Fighting Back

Twilio isn’t standing still. Their Q3 2025 results showed real momentum:

• $1.3B quarterly revenue (15% YoY growth—best in years)

• $235M non-GAAP operating income (29% YoY increase)

• 18% operating margin (up from 16% a year ago)

• $925M free cash flow expected for full year

And critically: voice AI customers grew 60% YoY at Twilio, though it remains a small part of overall revenue.

The company raised full-year guidance twice in 2025 and is finally showing what disciplined growth looks like after the post-pandemic hangover.

Why Didn’t Twilio Build This?

How did a company that pioneered developer-first voice APIs—with $70B peak market cap, thousands of engineers, and a decade head start—miss the AI voice revolution entirely?

The answer is a case study in how seemingly dominant incumbents lose to insurgents.

The $3.2 Billion Bet on the Wrong Future

In October 2020—the exact moment when the foundations of modern generative AI were being laid—Twilio made its biggest-ever strategic bet: acquiring Segment for $3.2 billion.

The thesis, articulated by CEO Jeff Lawson, was the “communications + data flywheel.” Combine Twilio’s messaging APIs with Segment’s customer data platform, and you’d own the entire customer engagement stack.

It was a reasonable thesis. It was also the wrong one. It became a massive distraction.

That $3.2B could have funded a world-class AI voice research lab. Instead, it bought a CDP that never delivered the promised growth. By December 2023, activist investors were demanding Twilio divest Segment entirely. The “flywheel” never spun.

The Survival Mode Problem

ElevenLabs was founded in 2022. Here’s what was happening at Twilio that same year:

• September 2022: Laid off 11% of workforce (800-900 people)

• February 2023: Laid off another 17% (1,500 people)

• December 2023: Laid off another 5% (300 people)

• Stock price: Down 85% from 2021 peak ($443 → ~$66)

• Activist pressure: Anson Funds and Legion Partners demanding asset sales

When you’re in survival mode, you don’t make bold bets on unproven technology. You cut costs, consolidate, and protect the core. That’s exactly what Twilio did.

The company that had grown “too fast, without enough focus” (Lawson’s words) was now focused entirely on profitability. R&D budgets shrank. Ambition contracted.

The Platform vs. Product Choice

Perhaps most tellingly, Twilio made an explicit architectural decision: be the platform for AI voice, not the provider of it.

Look at their ConversationRelay product (launched late 2024). It integrates with ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Amazon, and Google for TTS/STT. Twilio handles the “media plumbing”—the telephony, the WebSockets, the call routing—while partners provide the intelligence.

From Twilio’s own documentation: “Convert text into a human-sounding voice using speech synthesis technology from ElevenLabs.”

That’s not a competitor statement. That’s a customer statement. Twilio is literally paying ElevenLabs for the technology they could have built.

Leadership Transition at the Worst Time

In January 2024, Jeff Lawson—Twilio’s co-founder and CEO since 2008—resigned under intense pressure. His departure came shortly after his super-voting rights expired, making him vulnerable to activist pressure.

New CEO Khozema Shipchandler inherited a company in transition: profitable, stable, but no longer the disruptor. The AI voice opportunity window had, at least in part, closed.

What’s Really Driving the ElevenLabs Advantage?

1. AI-Native vs. AI-Augmented

ElevenLabs was built from day one around AI voice synthesis. Every product decision, every model improvement, every go-to-market motion has AI at the center.

Twilio is adding AI capabilities to a platform originally built for traditional telephony and SMS. They’re good at it—the Stytch acquisition for AI agent identity shows strategic awareness—but they’re retrofitting, not building native.

This is the classic innovator’s dilemma playing out in real-time.

2. Product Expansion at Speed

ElevenLabs isn’t just voice synthesis anymore. In the past 18 months:

• Voice Agents: Full conversational AI for customer support

• AI Dubbing: 29-language video translation

• ElevenLabs Music: Text-to-music generation (launched Aug 2025)

• Celebrity Voices: Deals with Michael Caine, Matthew McConaughey

• Enterprise Marketplace: Licensing voices for commercial use

Each of these could be a standalone company. They’re launching them as features.

3. The Revenue Quality Question

Twilio’s revenue is proven—it’s usage-based, sticky, and mission-critical for hundreds of thousands of businesses. They have 15+ years of customer relationships.

ElevenLabs’ ARR is growing faster, but at what cost? What’s the churn? What’s the gross margin? What’s the net dollar retention?

These numbers will matter enormously when (if?) ElevenLabs goes public. A $20B private valuation at 60x ARR is one thing. A public market valuation is another.

One Reason The Best AI B2B Startups Are Growing So Quickly: Truly Insane Value

The $20B Question

If ElevenLabs reaches $20B valuation by late 2026, what does that imply?

Scenario A: $500M ARR by 2H 2026

• Revenue multiple: 40x

• Growth rate: ~50% (slowing from 265%)

• Verdict: Aggressive but defensible for AI infrastructure leader

Scenario B: $700M+ ARR

• Revenue multiple: ~28x

• Verdict: Actually reasonable

Given their acceleration pattern (20 → 10 → 5 months to add $100M), Scenario B isn’t crazy. If they can maintain even half that velocity, they’re at $500M+ ARR by mid-2026.

Twilio’s Response Matters

The most underrated dynamic here: Twilio has something ElevenLabs doesn’t—$925M in annual free cash flow and a $20B market cap to make acquisitions.

If voice AI is truly the future of customer engagement (and the data suggests it is), Twilio can buy their way into relevance. The Stytch acquisition shows they’re willing to move.

Twilio can make up time buying an ElevenLabs competitor.  It has enough cash and currency.

What This Means for Founders

1. The playbook has changed. 20 months to $100M ARR used to be exceptional. Now it’s almost — as crazy as it sounds — table stakes for AI-native companies with real distribution and massive market pull and demand.

2. Developer-first still wins. Both companies prove that building for developers creates compounding distribution advantages. ElevenLabs has 1M+ developers on platform; Twilio started with 900,000 registered accounts at IPO.

3. AI is a compression function for time. ElevenLabs is achieving in 4 years what took Twilio 15+ years. That’s not just execution—it’s the nature of AI-native products that improve with every API call.

4. Public markets will test this. Twilio’s 73% correction from peak ($75B → $20B) is a warning. ElevenLabs’ private market valuation has no such check. When that changes, we’ll see which valuation was real.

The Best in B2B + AI Are Scaling At a Rate We’ve Never Seen

ElevenLabs isn’t just building a voice AI company. They’re compressing the entire B2B lifecycle—from startup to potential IPO candidate—into a timeline that makes traditional playbooks obsolete.

Twilio remains a massive but mature business: $5B in revenue, 12%+ growth, near-$1B in operating income, and a platform that powers mission-critical communications for hundreds of thousands of companies.

But the torch is passing. The question isn’t if AI-native companies will dominate communications infrastructure. It’s how fast—and whether the incumbents can evolve before they’re disrupted.

When ElevenLabs matches Twilio’s market cap (likely within 12-18 months at current trajectory), remember this moment. It’s the clearest signal yet that the rules of enterprise software have fundamentally changed.

The Lesson for Every Founder

Twilio’s miss on AI voice isn’t a failure of intelligence—it’s a failure of timing and capital allocation. When you’re fighting for survival, you can’t build for disruption.

But every incumbent eventually faces this choice. Optimize for today’s business, or bet on tomorrow’s paradigm.

ElevenLabs didn’t have legacy infrastructure to protect. They didn’t have activists demanding cost cuts. They didn’t have a $3.2B acquisition to justify. They just had two founders, a thesis about AI voice, and the willingness to build something new.

That’s the startup advantage that never goes away.

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Sources: TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Twilio Q3 2025 Earnings, SEC filings, company announcements

ElevenLabs: From 0 to $300M ARR in 3 Years. Why The Best AI B2B Apps Are Exploding