ElevenLabs vs Scale AI, Inc.: Strategic Comparison
Direct Answer
Scale AI, Inc. had $870.0M (unaudited) (FY2024); a comparable annual revenue row is unavailable for ElevenLabs. Revenue describes scale, not an overall winner.
Editorial research by Swet Parvadiya. Figures keep each company's fiscal year; amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Sources are listed below.
Key Differences at a Glance
| Field | ElevenLabs | Scale AI, Inc. |
|---|---|---|
| Latest annual revenue | N/A | $870.0M (unaudited) (FY2024) |
| Founded | 2022 | 2016 |
| Employees | 800 | 1,200 |
| Market Cap | N/A | N/A |
| Headquarters | United States | United States |
| Revenue / Employee | N/A | $725k / employee |
| Valuation Multiple | N/A | N/A |
Strategic Positioning
Business model and competitive context from the cited profiles
ElevenLabs Strategic Vector
Growth comes from three directions: moving from creator subscriptions to large enterprise voice-agent deployments in customer support and telephony; adding adjacent audio products (Scribe speech-to-text, Eleven Music, sound effects, dubbing); and expanding internationally, including new hubs announced with the Series D such as Bengaluru.
Scale AI, Inc. Strategic Vector
FY2024 Revenue BaselineScale's 2026 plan, as described by its leadership, is to move technical capabilities from the data business into applications faster, invest in a unified AI-native platform for enterprise and government customers, and expand abroad.
Quick Stats Comparison
| Metric | ElevenLabs | Scale AI, Inc. |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | N/A | $870.0M (unaudited) (FY2024) |
| Founded | 2022 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom & New York City, New York, United States | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Market Cap | N/A | N/A |
| Employees | 800 | 1,200 |
| Revenue / Employee | N/A | $725k / employee |
| Valuation Multiple | N/A | N/A |
ElevenLabs Revenue vs Scale AI, Inc. Revenue — Year by Year
| Year | ElevenLabs | Scale AI, Inc. | Higher reported revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | N/A | $870.0M (unaudited) | Only one figure available |
| 2023 | N/A | $335.0M | Only one figure available |
| 2022 | N/A | $290.0M (unaudited) | Only one figure available |
Business Model Breakdown
Overview: ElevenLabs vs Scale AI, Inc.
This in-depth comparison examines ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. across revenue, market value, business model, competitive positioning, and long-term growth strategy. Whether you are researching ElevenLabs on its own, evaluating Scale AI, Inc., or weighing the two companies side by side, the breakdown below highlights where each company leads and where the gap between ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. is widest.
On the headline numbers, annual revenue is N/A for ElevenLabs and $870.0M (unaudited) (FY2024) for Scale AI, Inc., while their respective market capitalizations stand at N/A and N/A. Both ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. are headquartered in United States. Their local markets and applicable rules may still differ.
ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs turned synthetic speech from robotic text-to-speech into expressive, human-sounding audio. Its 2023 public beta went viral with creators, and the company has since grown into one of Europe's most valuable AI startups, selling voice technology to individual creators, developers and large enterprises. The company is headquartered in London, United Kingdom.
Scale AI, Inc.: Scale AI sits between the people who build AI models and the organizations that use them. For labs it provides the human-written examples, rankings and test sets used to train and grade models. For enterprises and governments it builds the applications that put those models to work. The company updated its mission in September 2025 to developing reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Business Models: How ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. Make Money
ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. pursue distinct approaches to generating revenue, and understanding how each company operates is the foundation of any fair comparison between ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc..
ElevenLabs business model: ElevenLabs makes money in two ways. First, self-serve subscriptions: creators, podcasters, authors and small businesses pay monthly plans (from a free tier up to Business plans) that include a quota of generated characters or minutes. Second, usage-based API and enterprise contracts: developers and large companies pay for text-to-speech, speech-to-text, dubbing and voice agent minutes, often under multi-year enterprise agreements. Enterprise voice agents for customer support, sales and telephony became the fastest-growing part of the business in 2025-2026. The Voice Library adds a marketplace layer in which voice actors license their cloned voices and receive payouts when others use them.
Scale AI, Inc. business model: Scale AI earns money in two ways. Its data business charges AI labs and large technology companies for training data, reinforcement learning environments and model evaluations, produced by software pipelines plus a paid contributor network run through Outlier and Remotasks; the company says it has paid contributors more than $1 billion over ten years. Its applications business sells and deploys generative AI systems built on the Scale GenAI Platform and Donovan to enterprises and governments, typically through multi-year contracts. Scale does not publish revenue by segment. It said the data business became profitable in the second half of 2025 and that applications revenue more than doubled in that period.
Competitive Advantage: ElevenLabs vs Scale AI, Inc.
The durability of a company's moat often decides long-term winners. Here is how the competitive advantages of ElevenLabs stack up against those of Scale AI, Inc..
ElevenLabs competitive advantage: ElevenLabs' edge is audio quality and breadth. Its models (including Eleven v3, released in 2025) are widely regarded as among the most expressive speech generators, and it offers one platform covering text-to-speech, cloning, dubbing, transcription, sound effects, music and agents. Large enterprise and developer adoption gives it usage data and distribution, and the Voice Library gives it a licensed catalogue of voices that rivals lack.
Scale AI, Inc. competitive advantage: Scale's advantages are scale, track record and government access. It has applied what it calls 15 billion human decisions to train leading models across 150 languages and locales, it runs SEAL benchmarks such as Humanity's Last Exam and SWE-Bench Pro that labs cite at launch, and it holds U.S. defense work including the Pentagon's Thunderforge program and two 2025 Department of War awards totaling nearly $200 million. Few data vendors combine frontier-lab data experience with cleared public-sector delivery.
Growth Strategy: Where ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. Are Headed
Future prospects matter as much as current results. The growth strategies below explain how ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. each plan to expand from here.
ElevenLabs growth strategy: Growth comes from three directions: moving from creator subscriptions to large enterprise voice-agent deployments in customer support and telephony; adding adjacent audio products (Scribe speech-to-text, Eleven Music, sound effects, dubbing); and expanding internationally, including new hubs announced with the Series D such as Bengaluru.
Scale AI, Inc. growth strategy: Scale's 2026 plan, as described by its leadership, is to move technical capabilities from the data business into applications faster, invest in a unified AI-native platform for enterprise and government customers, and expand abroad. It opened or grew offices in New York, London, Washington, D.C., Doha, St. Louis, Riyadh and Dubai, and partners with Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS, Inception and Malomatia on Gulf deployments. On the lab side it is building realistic reinforcement learning environments and robotics datasets.
Financial Picture: ElevenLabs vs Scale AI, Inc.
A closer look at the financial trajectory of ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. rounds out the comparison.
ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs is private and does not publish audited accounts; its figures come from company announcements and press reports. ARR was above $330 million at the end of 2025 and above $500 million by April 2026, and reports around the September 2026 tender put it near $600 million. Funding milestones: $80 million Series B at $1.1 billion (January 2024), $180 million Series C at $3.3 billion (January 2025), a $6.6 billion secondary sale in 2025, a $500 million Series D at $11 billion led by Sequoia (February 2026), and a $300 million employee tender at $22 billion (September 2026). ElevenLabs is one of the fastest-growing AI voice technology startups, achieving unicorn status with a private valuation of approximately $1.1 billion.
Scale AI, Inc.: Scale is private and does not publish audited results. Bloomberg reported about $870 million of revenue in 2024 and a target near $2 billion for 2025 before the Meta deal. After OpenAI and Google pulled back, that target looked out of reach, but CEO Jason Droege wrote in early 2026 that 2025 was Scale's biggest revenue year, with more than $1 billion in new business and nearly half of bookings in Q4. The company valued itself at more than $29 billion in the June 2025 Meta transaction, up from $13.8 billion in its May 2024 Series F. Net income has not been disclosed, though Scale says the data business is now profitable. Scale AI is an absolute powerhouse in the artificial intelligence infrastructure sector, providing massive data labeling and RLHF services with a private market valuation of approximately $13.8 billion.
Company-Specific SWOT Notes
ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs models capture subtle emotional nuances, laughter, hesitation, whispering, and tension, that robotic legacy speech engines and generic LLM audio layers fail to replicate.
By enabling professional voice actors to earn recurring royalties when their voices are used, ElevenLabs created an organic network effect and ethical commercial supply chain.
Bad actors attempting to use voice cloning for unauthorized financial vishing scams, political fraud, or celebrity impersonation pose ongoing legal and regulatory liabilities.
Serving sub-150ms real-time audio streams requires dedicated low-latency GPU infrastructure, creating ongoing pressure on gross margins during peak global concurrency.
Replacing sluggish, despised automated IVR phone trees with intelligent, human-like conversational agents represents a $50B+ addressable enterprise telecommunications market.
OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode and Google Gemini live audio streaming could reduce developer reliance on third-party voice synthesis APIs for standard applications.
Scale AI, Inc.
Ten years of training-data work, 15 billion human decisions and benchmarks like Humanity's Last Exam give Scale credibility with model builders.
Two Department of War awards totaling nearly $200 million in 2025 and leadership of Thunderforge anchor a growing public-sector line.
Meta's 49% stake led OpenAI and Google to wind down data work in 2025.
Scale has had three CEOs since June 2025: Wang, interim CEO Jason Droege and Francis deSouza.
Management expected applications and international public-sector revenue to roughly double in 2026, led by the Gulf and the UK.
Surge AI, Mercor, Turing and others have won lab budgets, especially since mid-2025.
Factual Scorecard
| Category | Result | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Same-period Revenue Scale | Not comparable | ElevenLabs: N/A. Scale AI, Inc.: $870.0M (unaudited) (FY2024). Different or missing fiscal periods prevent a like-for-like ranking. |
| Founded Earlier | Scale AI, Inc. | ElevenLabs was founded in 2022; Scale AI, Inc. was founded in 2016. |
Comparison Takeaway: ElevenLabs vs Scale AI, Inc.
Methodology and sourcing reviewed by Swet Parvadiya. No date is shown unless this comparison has its own editorial review date.
Frequently Asked Questions: ElevenLabs vs Scale AI, Inc.
Which company was founded first, ElevenLabs or Scale AI, Inc.?
Scale AI, Inc. was founded in 2016; ElevenLabs was founded in 2022.
What revenue did ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. report?
Scale AI, Inc. had $870.0M (unaudited) (FY2024). A comparable annual revenue row is unavailable for ElevenLabs.
How do ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. make money?
ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs makes money in two ways. Scale AI, Inc.: Scale AI earns money in two ways.
Which is better, ElevenLabs or Scale AI, Inc.?
There is no evidence-based single winner. Compare ElevenLabs and Scale AI, Inc. on the same fiscal period and the metric relevant to the question, such as revenue, profitability, growth, product fit, or market value.
Sources & References
Cite This Page
Automatically generated citations for researchers.
CorpDigest. (2026). ElevenLabs vs Scale AI, Inc. Comparison. from https://corpdigest.com/compare/elevenlabs-vs-scale-ai
CorpDigest. "ElevenLabs vs Scale AI, Inc. Comparison." CorpDigest, 2026, https://corpdigest.com/compare/elevenlabs-vs-scale-ai.
CorpDigest. "ElevenLabs vs Scale AI, Inc. Comparison." CorpDigest. 2026. https://corpdigest.com/compare/elevenlabs-vs-scale-ai.