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Poland invests $11 million in ElevenLabs to build national AI hub
Poland's state bank BGK invested $11 million in AI voice startup ElevenLabs. The money will build AI Lab Poland, a hub for researchers, investors, and developers.
Poland's National Development Bank (BGK) has invested $11 million (over 40 million zloty) in ElevenLabs, the AI voice-generation company valued at $11 billion in its latest funding round. The deal, announced Wednesday, aims to finance AI Lab Poland - a national centre that will bring together researchers, investors, and developers under one roof.
The investment flows through BGK's Vinci investment vehicle, which manages assets worth more than 1 billion zloty. The bank confirmed it has become a shareholder in ElevenLabs but did not disclose the size of its stake.
The company behind the investment
ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 by two Poles, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, who met as teenagers in Warsaw. The company is now headquartered in New York but maintains strong ties to its country of origin. Its Text-To-Speech models produce AI-generated voices that closely resemble natural speech, putting it among the first firms to achieve near-human-level speech synthesis.
The company's tools power audiobook narration for Spotify and provide dubbing and character voices for Meta's Instagram. Its models also drive conversational AI assistants for business applications, including sales and customer service.
"Together we hope to build technology that starts in Poland and scales to the world," ElevenLabs said in its announcement of the agreement.
Building AI Lab Poland
BGK's primary goal is to finance and support the construction of AI Lab Poland, a national centre for AI development. The hub is designed to connect researchers, investors, and developers in a single ecosystem. BGK president Mirosław Czekaj said the bank views the investment as having "the potential to generate a significant multiplier effect," helping launch projects that could themselves be worth hundreds of millions of zloty.
Polish finance minister Andrzej Domański framed the investment in broader terms. "Poland cannot and does not stand aside," he said. "The future will not belong to those who exclusively use technology. The future will belong to those who create it."
Staniszewski pointed to the ElevenLabs Warsaw Summit earlier this month, attended by President Karol Nawrocki and defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, as evidence of the country's potential. "We have many brilliant talents here," he told news website Interia. "We want to make Poland one of the main AI centres for the next decade."
Poland's AI position
Eurostat data published last year showed Poland has the European Union's second-lowest proportion of companies using AI tools. The government has responded with a 1 billion zloty investment plan, which included the launch of a state-backed Polish Large Language Model in 2024.
Microsoft president Brad Smith encouraged global tech firms to invest in Poland last year, calling it "the place to grow your business." He said the country has an opportunity to establish itself as an "AI Valley" that pioneers artificial intelligence development.
Why this matters for IT and development
For developers and IT professionals in Poland - and those considering relocation - the AI Lab Poland signals a concrete commitment to building local AI infrastructure rather than importing it. The hub will need engineers, researchers, and technical staff across speech synthesis, model training, and application development. For professionals looking to build skills in these areas, AI for IT & Development training paths are becoming directly relevant to the kinds of roles this investment is designed to create.