India is quickly becoming one of the biggest testing grounds for AI. Private investment in the country’s AI sector jumped from $1.2 billion in 2024 to $4.1 billion in 2025, according to the World Bank, while companies including Google, Microsoft and NVIDIA continue to put money into its AI ecosystem.
ElevenLabs, the AI voice startup, wants a piece of that growth.
The London-based company plans to expand its support for Indian languages to all 22 officially recognised languages within a year. It also plans to invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” in India as it expands its operations.
Damilare Odedina
Why ElevenLabs is betting on India
India offers a difficult but potentially valuable market for voice AI: more than 100 spoken languages, a huge technical workforce and hundreds of millions of people still using feature phones.
ElevenLabs already calls India its biggest market outside the US. “If we can solve how people interact with AI here, I am confident we can solve it anywhere in the world,” said Mati Staniszewski, CEO and co-founder of ElevenLabs.
The company currently supports speech-to-text and text-to-speech in 14 Indian languages and plans to reach all 22 within a year.
The demand is already visible. Indian businesses recorded 100 million conversations on ElevenAgents over the past year, with more than 70% in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.
ElevenLabs has also signed its first partnership with an Indian state government through an MoU with the Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society. The partnership will explore voice AI in Kannada for skilling, citizen services and grievance redressal, alongside responsible AI and voice restoration for people who have lost the ability to speak.
India is becoming a bigger AI battleground
ElevenLabs is far from alone in seeing the opportunity. OpenAI and Anthropic have opened their first India offices, while Amazon, Microsoft and Google have committed billions to AI and cloud infrastructure in the country.
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