ElevenLabs hires Adyen's CFO to make its margin-for-share story investable

The hire that only makes sense before an IPO

Ethan Tandowsky left Adyen, the Amsterdam-listed payments group, on 31 August for what analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald told clients was a pre-IPO company ¹. Eight days later he was chief financial officer of ElevenLabs ², the four-year-old voice AI firm, which is reported to be eyeing a 2028 listing↗ ³⁴.

Tandowsky joined Adyen as a financial controller in 2016, ran group finance from 2020 and made CFO in 2023, a decade spanning the 2018 listing and a twentyfold revenue climb ¹². This is a hire made to repeat that trick, and the second piece of listing machinery in a week: Ashley Kramer, OpenAI's former vice president of enterprise sales, arrived as first chief revenue officer on 2 September, Tandowsky six days later ¹⁰.

Thirty-seven times revenue, and rising

Backers value ElevenLabs at about $22 billion, roughly 37 times the $600 million in annual recurring revenue its chief executive confirmed on stage at the Nrth conference in Toronto↗ ⁵⁶. The direction matters more than the doubling. February's $11 billion Series D was struck against the roughly $330 million of ARR the company ended 2025 with, about 33 times; revenue has nearly doubled since and the multiple rose anyway ⁴⁸.

The private ladder has run $3.3 billion in January 2025, $6.6 billion that September, $11 billion in February ⁸. The backers stamping $22 billion and the employees selling into the tender carry that bet ⁸: they need the margin story to hold, and ElevenLabs benefits only if the 2028 window opens at a defensible margin print.

The CEO keeps bidding his margins down

Asked about gross margin, Mati Staniszewski promised a vague answer and delivered a blunt one: "if we can pass on any savings to the customer, we do that," and the company does not "mind the margins going lower" over the next five years ⁵. The pressure behind that stance is free.

Mistral released Voxtral TTS in March↗ with open weights, and in Mistral's own listener tests it beat ElevenLabs' Flash v2.5 model 62.8% of the time on flagship voices and 69.9% on voice customization ⁶. A Mistral executive priced the pitch as "a fraction of anything else on the market" ⁷.

Revenue nearly doubled in nine months

ARR ran from roughly $330 million at the end of 2025 to $500 million by May to $600 million now ⁴⁵⁸.

The mix is climbing with it: enterprise customers are above 55% of revenue, up from about 40% a year earlier, and Klarna runs first-line phone support for 35 million US customers on ElevenLabs voices ⁵.

The defense is compliance, not voice quality

Open weights do not come with guarantees. ElevenLabs covers more than 70 languages to Voxtral's nine ⁶⁷, and its IBM watsonx integration ships PCI compliance and a zero-retention mode for HIPAA-sensitive work ⁶. It sells agents into the roughly $40 billion US call-center market, a labor budget rather than a software line ⁶. Staniszewski predicted a year ago that audio models would commoditize; he still calls the quality gap "still significant" ⁵.

The number a filing cannot leave vague

On 2028, Staniszewski would only say the decision "will depend on the time and place" ⁵. The tell is the figure he declined to give. Any listing document must print a gross margin, and the first public one will show whether the price war bought durable share or merely revenue. The machinery is arriving on schedule; the margin is still a promise.