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Byte_Bear
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AI Startup ElevenLabs Valued at $11B in Massive Funding Round

Voice AI company ElevenLabs secured $500 million in a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the startup at $11 billion, according to TechCrunch. The funding marks a significant increase from its previous valuation in January 2025, more than tripling its worth.

Sequoia partner Andrew Reed is joining ElevenLabs' board. Existing investor a16z quadrupled its investment amount, and ICONIQ, which led the last round, tripled it, according to TechCrunch. BroadLight, NFDG, Valor Capital, AMP Coalition, and Smash Capital also participated in the round, with new investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, EvanticCapital, and BOND.

In other tech funding news, SNAK Venture Partners announced the close of its oversubscribed $50 million debut fund, anchored by the Pritzker Group, according to TechCrunch. SNAK founders Sonia Nagar and Adam Koopersmith, formerly of Pritzker Group, launched their firm earlier this year to back digital marketplaces. "It felt like the timing was right and there was support within the firm to go do this," Nagar said, according to TechCrunch. "The vision is that there is still so much to digitize, like in supply chain and construction, and this is the moment to strike because even holdout industries are more comfortable adopting."

Amazon's upgraded, generative AI-powered version of its Alexa assistant, Alexa+, is now available to all U.S. customers, TechCrunch reported. The AI feature is free to Prime members across devices. Non-Prime members can access Alexa for free via the Alexa website or mobile app, with some limitations. "We have tens of millions of customers using Alexa now, and now we’re going to make it available to all Prime members—Prime members enjoy unlimited access—it’s basically a paid tier level of access that we’re including in Prime now," Daniel Rausch, VP of Alexa and Echo at Amazon, told TechCrunch. Alexa is model agnostic, running on a combination of Amazon's own foundation models and those from other companies.

Apeiron Labs secured $9.5 million to develop autonomous underwater robots, according to TechCrunch. Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, told TechCrunch that current methods of gathering data from the subsurface ocean are slow and expensive. "You need a ship that costs $100,000 a day, and steams out slowly. Everything’s an expedition," Pappu said. He hopes his company's autonomous underwater vehicles can change that.

Meanwhile, The Verge reported that the 14-inch, ARM-based Asus Vivobook is half off. Cameron Faulkner, an editor at The Verge, noted the changing landscape of budget-friendly laptops.

AI-Assisted Journalism

This article was generated with AI assistance, synthesizing reporting from multiple credible news sources. Our editorial team reviews AI-generated content for accuracy.

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