Logo of ElevenLabs, an artificial intelligence software company Credit: ElevenLabs Five ElevenLabs services are listed on the software lot of G-Cloud 15, the UK government’s cloud buying framework, according to the Digital Marketplace. They cover conversational agents, transcription, dubbing and text-to-speech. Three months ago the same government signed an agreement with the company that committed it to buying nothing. TNW reported in June that the memorandum between AI minister Kanishka Narayan and chief executive Mati Staniszewski was voluntary and non-binding, with no procurement commitments attached.
There is now a route. A listing is not a contract. G-Cloud 15 replaces a GBP 4.8B agreement with one worth about GBP 14B over four years, and the government says roughly 90% of the suppliers on it are small and medium-sized firms. Its own material notes that a place does not guarantee business.
What it means is that a department or an NHS trust can buy without running its own tender. The supplier name on four of the five entries is Eleven Labs Inc. The fifth is offered through a reseller, Generation Digital. That entity is incorporated in the United States.
The company was founded in 2022 by two Poles, Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, and keeps offices in London, New York, Warsaw and San Francisco. Warsaw has a stake in it. Vinci, the venture arm of Poland’s state development bank, bought in for $11M in June, and the company plans to take its Warsaw headcount from 60 to more than 200. So the catalogue entry a British buyer clicks belongs to an American company with Polish founders and a Polish state shareholder.
The services match what the June memorandum described. Scribe handles transcription, the dubbing product covers more than 29 languages, and the text-to-speech service is pitched at public sector teams generating audio from text. The memorandum named Welsh-language services and people with visual impairments. The search results carry no prices.
Each service page lists its own. The company was valued at $11B in February and was in talks in July at $22B. Nobody has announced a purchase, and the first call-off is the thing worth watching.
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