ElevenLabs, a European company with a London headquarters and Polish founders, has made a significant hire, bringing in Ashley Kramer as its first chief revenue officer. Kramer joins from OpenAI, where she led enterprise sales, according to Bloomberg. The move comes as ElevenLabs experiences a notable shift in its revenue stream, with over half of its revenue now coming from enterprise customers, up from 40% last year.

This shift has been described by chief executive Mati Staniszewski as an inflection point for the company. Kramer's experience, which also includes stints at GitLab, Oracle, and NASA, will likely be valuable in navigating this new landscape. ElevenLabs has reported crossing $600M in annualized revenue, with notable customers such as Deutsche Telekom, Revolut, Meta, and Stripe.

The company's valuation has doubled in just seven months, with talks of a tender offer at roughly $22B, as reported by TNW. Kramer's arrival is particularly notable, as it marks a move of senior commercial talent from an American lab to a European company, a less common direction of travel.

Her appointment also comes ahead of a key European deadline. The AI Act requires providers of systems generating synthetic audio to mark outputs in a machine-readable format by December 2, 2026. While systems already on the market, like ElevenLabs' voice models, have until this date to comply, deployers of AI technology are also subject to their own set of rules, including the disclosure of deepfakes.

Exemptions to these rules are narrower than they initially seem, with artistic, creative, satirical, and fictional works subject to reduced disclosure rather than a complete exemption. The push into enterprise sales has already been met with a reputation for high expectations, with a company sales leader reportedly telling candidates to expect 20x quota and long hours.

Kramer has stated that her decision to join ElevenLabs predates the recent churn at OpenAI, where the chief revenue officer, chief operating officer, and applications head have all departed in recent weeks. This hire signals a significant move by a European company to acquire American enterprise sales leadership, just months before its outputs must comply with European law.

Questo articolo è stato scritto con l'assistenza dell'IA.
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