From Adyen's Finance Desk to an $11B Voice Lab: ElevenLabs Hires CFO Ethan Tandowsky and Sets Its Clock on 2028

ElevenLabs, the London-based voice AI company now valued at $11 billion, has hired Ethan Tandowsky — the former Chief Financial Officer of payments giant Adyen — as its own CFO, in a move that formalizes the startup’s ambition to go public, with 2028 named as the working target.

The appointment, first reported by The Information and confirmed by ElevenLabs on September 8, 2026, is the clearest signal yet that one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI companies is shifting from land-grab mode to institution-building mode. And the choice of person says a great deal about how ElevenLabs sees its own future.

Who ElevenLabs Just Hired

Ethan Tandowsky is not a typical startup CFO. He joined Adyen — the Dutch payments platform that quietly became one of Europe’s most valuable fintechs — back in 2016 as a financial controller, rose to head of group finance in 2020, and became CFO in 2023. Critically, he held finance posts at the company throughout its 2018 initial public offering, giving him direct, hands-on experience taking a European technology company public on the Amsterdam exchange.

Adyen announced in May 2026 that Tandowsky would step down effective August 31, 2026, “to pursue an opportunity outside fintech.” At the time, few would have guessed the opportunity was a voice-synthesis startup. Adyen named Hwa Tsao, its SVP of group finance, as interim CFO.

For ElevenLabs CEO and co-founder Mati Staniszewski, the pitch is straightforward: as the company scales, Tandowsky will “build out our financial infrastructure,” per the company’s announcement. That is IPO-language. Companies installing a public-markets veteran as CFO two years before a targeted listing are not hedging — they are building the audit trails, revenue-recognition discipline, and investor-relations muscle that a modern public listing demands.

The Numbers Behind the Ambition

The 2028 IPO talk is not aspirational fluff; it rests on one of the more striking growth curves in applied AI.

Founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs crossed roughly $25 million in annual recurring revenue in 2023, hit around $90 million by late 2024, and reached approximately $330 million in ARR during 2025 — growing some 175% year over year at that point. By April 2026 the company had surpassed $500 million in ARR, having added $100 million of it in a single quarter.

The customer base has scaled alongside the revenue. ElevenLabs counts 41% of the Fortune 500 among its clients, and its platform now processes tens of millions of voice interactions monthly — one widely circulated figure has the company handling 62 million monthly calls with 99.99% reliability. Revenue per employee, at roughly $825,000, ranks among the highest capital-efficiency marks in the AI sector.

The balance sheet reflects that momentum. In February 2026, ElevenLabs raised a $500 million Series D at an $11 billion valuation — more than triple its prior mark — led by Sequoia Capital, with a16z quadrupling its position and ICONIQ tripling down. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed joined the board. The round brought total funding to roughly $781 million, with Nvidia among the earlier backers, and named investors ranging from BlackRock to Jamie Foxx and Eva Longoria.

From Voice Cloner to Platform Company

What makes the IPO trajectory credible is that ElevenLabs is no longer just the voice-cloning tool that made its name among podcasters and game studios. The company has deliberately repositioned itself as a multi-platform business spanning three main pillars: ElevenAgents for agentic voice workloads, alongside its expanded speech and audio platforms covering music generation and studio production.

That platform shift matters for the CFO hire. Voice synthesis alone is a features market — Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all bundle competent text-to-speech into their clouds, and rivals like Cartesia have undercut ElevenLabs on price, with Sonic 3.6 listing at $49 per million characters against Eleven v3’s $100. But agentic voice — AI that can hold a phone conversation, resolve a support ticket, or take a drive-through order in real time — is an infrastructure market, with usage-metered revenue that compounds like a payments network.

This is precisely the transition Adyen itself made a decade ago: from a payments API to the financial backbone of internet commerce. Tandowsky spent ten years inside a company that scaled through that exact transformation, reaching over $600 million in quarterly processing-scale finance before he left. The analogy writes itself: usage-based revenue, enterprise logos, network reliability as the product. ElevenLabs’ 99.99% uptime figure for its conversational platform is the kind of metric a payments CFO knows how to defend in an S-1.

The 2028 Logic

Timing an IPO two years out is a statement about market maturity as much as company readiness. The current window for AI public debuts is thin, and investors burned by the 2021 vintage of money-losing tech listings now demand durable growth with a credible path to cash-flow discipline. A 2028 target gives ElevenLabs two-plus years of compounding at current rates — if the trajectory holds even partially, the company would approach the ticker with well over $1 billion in ARR.

It also gives Tandowsky time to do the unglamorous work: multi-year audit history, segment reporting for the three platforms, revenue-quality disclosures that separate API usage from enterprise contracts, and the governance scaffolding that European exchanges increasingly expect.

There are risks, of course. The voice AI market is crowded and commoditizing at the low end; pricing pressure from Cartesia, Speechify, and hyperscaler-native engines will test the premium tiers. Regulatory scrutiny of voice cloning — the technology that built the brand — keeps intensifying on both sides of the Atlantic, and the EU AI Act’s transparency provisions will apply fully to synthetic media by then. And an $11 billion valuation set in a hot private market must be defended against public-market multiples when the listing actually prices.

But the direction is unambiguous. With a Sequoia-led cap table, half a billion in ARR, near-half of the Fortune 500 as customers, and now a CFO who has already taken one European company public, ElevenLabs is building the 2028 debut in plain sight. The voice of AI, it turns out, is getting a balance sheet to match.