ElevenLabs hires OpenAI VP Ashley Kramer as its first revenue chief

Why it matters

Staniszewski and Dabkowski are shifting ElevenLabs from founder-led selling toward a formal enterprise revenue operation. Kramer's appointment will test whether its voice technology can become infrastructure that large customers deploy repeatedly, rather than another impressive AI demonstration.

ElevenLabs co-founders Mati Staniszewski (@mati) and Piotr Dabkowski (@dabkowski_piotr) have hired Ashley Kramer, previously OpenAI's vice president of enterprise, as their first chief revenue officer, Bloomberg Technology reported on September 2. Kramer will oversee global revenue, partnerships and customer engagement, according to ElevenLabs' announcement.

The appointment gives Staniszewski and Dabkowski a dedicated commercial leader as they try to turn an audio research lead into a durable enterprise platform. The two met as teenagers in Warsaw and wanted to improve the quality and naturalness of computer-generated speech. Staniszewski later studied mathematics at Imperial College London and worked with enterprise and government customers at Palantir. Dabkowski studied engineering at Oxford, earned an MPhil from Cambridge and worked in machine learning at Google.

That background helped ElevenLabs build realistic text-to-speech and voice-cloning tools. The next stage depends on selling a broader set of products into organizations that expect security reviews, integrations, procurement support and measurable returns. ElevenLabs now markets ElevenAgents for voice and chat agents, ElevenCreative for generating and localizing media, and ElevenAPI for developers embedding its audio models.

Kramer is the executive Staniszewski and Dabkowski have chosen to organize that expansion. ElevenLabs says its agents handle more than 15 million conversations each week and that enterprise customers generate 55% of revenue. Both figures are self-reported, and the supplied reporting does not independently audit them. They still explain why a formal revenue organization has become a priority.

A technical operator for a sales job

Kramer's resume fits a product that must be explained to engineering leaders and sold across large organizations. She led enterprise sales at OpenAI. Before OpenAI, Kramer held senior sales, strategy, marketing and technology roles at GitLab.

Her career began closer to the product. A Tableau biography says Kramer worked as a software engineer at NASA and Oracle before moving into product roles at Amazon and Tableau, where she led cloud strategy and technology partnerships. She later held senior product and marketing positions at Alteryx.

That technical background matters for ElevenLabs. Voice agents operate inside telephone systems, customer databases, support workflows and payment processes. A polished demonstration can win attention; a deployment that handles millions of live conversations requires latency controls, monitoring, data governance and a clear escalation path when the agent fails.

Kramer's remit extends beyond closing contracts. She will oversee ElevenLabs' partnership network and customer engagement alongside revenue. That puts her near the feedback loop between what ElevenLabs' researchers can build and what buyers will deploy.

"If AI sounds robotic, cold, or simply doesn't understand your intent, people won't trust it," Kramer said in the announcement. Her argument matches the founders' original product thesis: better speech can make software easier to use across languages and cultures. The commercial version of that thesis is harder. ElevenLabs must prove that natural-sounding agents improve customer interactions enough to justify replacing or restructuring existing workflows.

The revenue claims are getting bigger

Kramer arrives after ElevenLabs spent 2026 rapidly increasing both its reported financial scale and its enterprise ambitions. On February 4, ElevenLabs announced a $500 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital at an $11 billion valuation. Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Growth increased their investments, while Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital and BOND joined the round.

The February materials said ElevenLabs ended 2025 with more than $330 million in annual recurring revenue. A May 5 update, revised on August 31, put the year-end figure at $350 million and said ElevenLabs had passed $500 million in ARR during the first four months of 2026. ElevenLabs reported those figures; they have not been independently audited in public.

RuntimeWire previously examined ElevenLabs' reported $500 million ARR as the business expanded its government work. The newly updated company materials now provide a direct public basis for the $500 million claim, though they do not resolve the difference between the two year-end 2025 figures.

ElevenLabs also said in May that it employed 530 people across more than 50 countries. Hiring a first chief revenue officer at that size formalizes work that founders commonly oversee themselves during earlier stages. It also creates a single executive accountable for converting product usage and pilots into recurring contracts.

The $500 million financing gave Staniszewski and Dabkowski ample capacity to hire salespeople, partnership managers and deployment specialists. It also raised the cost of weak execution. An $11 billion valuation assumes ElevenLabs can hold its position as larger AI platforms add voice generation and real-time conversation to products already sold through established enterprise channels.

Staniszewski and Dabkowski are building beyond voice

ElevenLabs is positioning its products as a broader interaction layer for enterprises, spanning voice, chat and other customer channels. The Kramer hire puts an experienced OpenAI operator in charge of taking that proposition to market.

The move also reflects how far ElevenLabs has traveled from its original text-to-speech and voice-generation products. Staniszewski and Dabkowski are now selling software for customer support, sales, marketing and internal operations. ElevenLabs names Meta, Stripe, Klarna, Hasbro and Deutsche Telekom as customers, though ElevenLabs has not disclosed the size or duration of those relationships.

Kramer's first challenge will be imposing commercial discipline on that breadth. ElevenLabs serves developers, creative professionals, governments and multinational businesses, each with different buying processes and product requirements. A broad platform creates more opportunities to sell. It can also scatter product and sales resources across too many markets.

Staniszewski and Dabkowski have already shown that realistic synthetic speech can attract users and capital. Their next test is organizational: building a sales operation capable of turning ElevenLabs' research into repeatable deployments without losing the product speed that created the opening. Kramer now owns that job.