Carles Reina, GTM manager at Eleven Labs, shared why he invested in an AI company.
Eleven laboratories
The angel investor, who backed a billion-dollar AI startup when it was in its infancy, said he decided to invest in the company after meeting one of its founders for just 30 minutes.
Carles Reina first decided to invest in AI voice startup Eleven Labs in 2022 when he was a venture partner at pre-seed fund Concept Ventures.
Founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, Eleven Labs specializes in advanced text-to-speech and voice cloning technology. In its Series C funding round in January this year, the company raised $180 million at a valuation of $3.3 billion.
Then in September, the company announced it would allow employees to sell $6.6 billion in stock.
But before Eleven Labs even had a concrete product, Reina, who was working at Palantir Technologies at the time, decided to take a chance on the company after meeting with Staniszewski.
“I met Mati when he was still at Palantir,” Reina said in an interview with CNBC Make It. “We started talking and within 30 minutes of the first conversation I said to him, ‘How much money do you want?'”
Reina explained that voice AI hadn’t gotten much attention before ChatGPT was introduced because big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft all had text-to-speech products, but they hadn’t really taken off yet.
“At ElevenLabs no one paid attention to voice AI, in the truest sense of the word no one wanted to give anything [them] Money. In the early days of the pre-seed round, no VC actually wanted to back ElevenLabs. So those are the industries that I really like, so I can get in before anyone else,” he said.
Reina has made 74 angel investments in the last eight years, including Revolut, Volumetric, Elroy Air and Speckle. Today he works for Eleven Labs as a go-to-market manager.
He said he always tries to identify industries that other investors don’t pay attention to: “That’s what I did.” [invested in] Mostly AI, before it got sexy. I also did robotics before it was sexy.
The #1 trait to look for in founders
Reina specializes in investing in pre-seed companies – those with an idea but often without a fully developed product. This means identifying key characteristics of founders that indicate a startup will be successful.
“If there’s a product, that’s fantastic, but if there’s no product, that’s totally fine with me… I love founders who are very technical. They’re super sharp, very smart, and they’re literally trying to build a global company from day one,” Reina explained.
He said he “invests based on a thesis.” So if a founder is highly technical, they have a deeper understanding of the product and the market they are selling to.
Reina said he saw these qualities in Staniszewksi that convinced him to support ElevenLabs, even though the market for voice AI was very small at the time.
“Nobody wants to talk to AI voices if they sound robotic. That’s basically the biggest problem there was, right… When I spoke to Mati, he talked about both elements, and it wasn’t on the market yet,” Reina said.
“It was really interesting to see him think about the problems of the entire ecosystem before he even had a product or before he even spoke to a real potential customer.”
Staniszewski had a background in mathematics and graduated with honors from Imperial College London. His vision and technical expertise won Reina over, and ElevenLabs became one of the few startups he wanted to support “literally in less than an hour.”
Now Eleven Labs is planning global expansion, including building new hubs in Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico, and is preparing the company to go public within the next five years, Staniszewski told CNBC in July.
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