How A Tiny Polish Startup Became The Multi-Billion-Dollar Voice Of AI

ByIain Martin,

Forbes Staff.

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ubbed films in Poland are horrible. A lone lektor delivers all the dialogue in an enervated Slavic monotone. There is no cast. No variation between speakers. Young audiences hate it. “Ask any Polish person and they will tell you it’s terrible,” says Mateusz Staniszewski, the cofounder of AI speech outfit ElevenLabs. “I guess it was a communist thing that stuck as a cheap way to produce content.”

While working at Palantir, Staniszewski teamed up with high school friend and Google engineer Piotr Dabkowski to experiment with artificial intelligence. The pair realized that one project, a particularly promising AI public speaking coach, could solve the uniquely Polish horror of Leonardo DiCaprio or Scarlett Johansson being drowned out by a lektor “star” like Maciej Gudowski.