Polyglot.

Language.

A structured form of communication and primary method through which humans convey information.

Saint Augustine called human speech “the faculty which raises men above the level of animals.”

Jean-Jacques Rosseau argued that language originated from emotions.

Immanuel Kant argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought.

Nearly every notable philosopher studied language with an incredible curiosity and developed their own understandings and ideas around the purpose of language. Language is universally known as the original wonder of the world.

• Sidebar: Jean-Jacques Rosseau posthumously published an autobiography called Confessions, which got rebranded to the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rosseau in order to escape the shadow of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which was the first Western world autobiography ever written.

Linguistics is the study of language.

Sociolinguistics examines language in relation to societal factors: why does a young farmer from Texas speak English differently than an old lawyer in Boston?

Dialectology is a subfield of sociolinguistics that isolates regional differences: why does an old lawyer in Boston speak English differently than an old lawyer in Los Angeles?

Applied linguistics activates linguistics knowledge to solve real life problems.

But no subfield of linguistics has seen as much recent growth as computational linguistics, a branch in which computer science is applied to analyze, model, and synthesize natural language.

The capital of Poland is Warsaw, a city with nearly two million residents, making it one of the largest in the European Union.

They speak Polish.

Warsaw was where Piotr Dabkowski met Mati Staniszewski. Both originated from smaller localities near Warsaw before their families moved to the capital around the same time. Piotr came from Gdansk and Mati came from Zalese. They became close friends during their time at Copernicus High School.

Piotr and Mati both moved to the UK for college, with Piotr attending Oxford then Cambridge and Mati attending Imperial College London.

A large part of their friendship grew out of their interest in technology. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms were all topics of conversation that built their bond. These two young men were not normal teenagers.

One aspect of their friendship that was normal, however, was their love for cinema.

As young children in Poland, the movies were low quality Polish voiceovers. Eventually, dubbing came around.

• Dubbing is the process of replacing the original spoken dialogue in a film with new audio recorded in a different language, performed by voice actors.

Voiceovers corrupted the quality of movies because the translating voice was often monotone, and oftentimes the same voice was used for different actors.

Piotr and Mati were both intrigued by the qualities that made human voices human.

Why can’t Siri and Alexa sound like real humans?

In April 2022, they co-founded ElevenLabs to create text-to-speech (TTS) technology and voice models that were indistinguishable from human voice.

The use cases are pretty broad. A few products include:

• Dubbing Studios: local translation and dubbing into multiple languages while preserving natural voice quality and synchronizing language with video visuals

• Projects: for creators looking for high quality long form text to speech (TTS) such as books, movie scripts, and long articles.

• Conversational AI agents: build AI agents that speak; Decagon uses ElevenLabs to enhance their AI customer service agents

In just three years of operations, Mati and Piotr have built a company that is used widely by the top creators, media outlets, Fortune 500 companies, and politicians.

→ The Washington Post generates audio versions of their articles through the startup’s technology

→ NYC Mayor Adams used the technology to contact New Yorkers with multilingual robocalls

→ Workers at more than 60% of F500 companies use ElevenLabs in their workflows, which speaks to the broader trend of the “consumerization of enterprise tools” that has led to widespread adoption for companies like Figma and Notion

ElevenLabs grew from $25M ARR in 2023 to $90M ARR by the end of 2024.

In January 2024, ElevenLabs raised $80M at a $1.1B valuation.

In January 2025, ElevenLabs raised $180M at a $3.3B valuation.

Investors include Sequoia, ICONIQ, Smash Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and more.

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