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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Poland’s National Development Bank (BGK) has invested $11 million (just over 40 million zloty) in ElevenLabs, a major AI firm that has its roots in Poland. The investment aims to establish an AI development centre in Poland.
“Together we hope to build technology that starts in Poland and scales to the world,” declared ElevenLabs, announcing the agreement.
The firm, which specialises in AI-powered voice-generation tools, is now headquartered in New York but was founded in 2022 by two Poles, Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, who initially met as teenagers in Warsaw.
It has grown rapidly, with its latest funding round, in February this year, valuing ElevenLabs at $11 billion. Among ElevenLabs’s partners are Spotify, for which it provides audiobooks with AI-generated narration, and Meta, where it provides dubbing and character voices for Instagram.
#Vinci z grupy #BGK inwestuje w @ElevenLabs – polską firmę, światowego lidera w dziedzinie AI audio. Dzięki transakcji o wartości 42 mln zł powstanie AI Lab Poland.
To miejsce, które będzie łączyć naukowców, przedsiębiorców i twórców technologii pracujących nad kolejną generacją… pic.twitter.com/fhSHDWi60Z
— Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego 🇵🇱 (@BGK_pl) June 17, 2026
On Wednesday, BGK announced that it would invest in ElevenLabs through its Vinci investment vehicle, which manages assets worth more than 1 billion zloty. The bank says it has become a shareholder in ElevenLabs, but has not disclosed the size of its stake.
The main goal of its investment is to help finance and support the construction of AI Lab Poland, a national centre for AI development aimed at bringing together researchers, investors and developers.
“We want Poland to be a place where technologies of the future are created, financed, and developed – and the BGK Group’s investment in ElevenLabs is a step in this direction,” said Polish finance minister Andrzej Domański.
“Poland cannot and does not stand aside,” he added. “The future will not belong to those who exclusively use technology. The future will belong to those who create it.”
Staniszewski said he hoped the new AI hub would help “harness the energy and ambition” seen at the ElevenLabs Warsaw Summit earlier this month, which was attended by leading Polish tech figures as well as President Karol Nawrocki and defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz.
“We have many brilliant talents here,” said Staniszewski, quoted by news website Interia. “We want to leverage this initiative to make Poland one of the main AI centres for the next decade.”
BGK’s president, Mirosław Czekaj, said the bank sees the investment as having “the potential to generate a significant multiplier effect”, helping to launch projects that could in themselves be worth hundreds of millions of zloty.
Forbes looks at how two young Poles created a startup that now outperforms giants like OpenAI in AI voice production and has reached a valuation of $6.6 billion.
But the firm has also been accused by audiobook narrators of exploiting their work https://t.co/NgZDj3mReg
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) December 1, 2025
ElevenLabs was among the first firms to achieve near-human-level speech synthesis, producing AI-generated voices that closely resemble natural speech. Its models are used to provide services such as dubbing and conversational AI assistants for business applications, including sales and customer service.
Eurostat data published last year showed that Poland has the European Union’s second-lowest proportion of companies using AI tools.
The government has sought to promote the sector through a 1 billion zloty investment plan, which included the launch last year of a state-backed Polish Large Language Model.
In 2024, Microsoft president Brad Smith encouraged global tech firms to invest in Poland, calling it “the place to grow your business”. In particular, he said that the country has the opportunity to establish itself as an “AI Valley”, pioneering the development of artificial intelligence.
Microsoft will invest $700m in Poland to expand its existing data centre, develop AI, strengthen cybersecurity and boost competitiveness.
"This represents an enormous vote of confidence in the Polish people," says @Microsoft president @BradSmi https://t.co/Z3ngeTZ5d2
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) February 17, 2025
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego/X
Alicja Ptak is deputy editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She has written for Clean Energy Wire and The Times, and she hosts her own podcast, The Warsaw Wire, on Poland’s economy and energy sector. She previously worked for Reuters.
