TRO | ElevenLabs Hits US$500 Million ARR

Plus, Anthropic Says Finance Is Its Next Frontier and James Murdoch Bids on Vox Podcasts

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Meliora Company
May 11, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

 Subscribe | 11th May, 2026

In this fast-moving Vertical AI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our take on 3 stories that will help you be relentlessly optimistic about the future.

1. ElevenLabs Hits US$500 Million ARR With Hollywood And Wall Street Backing

ElevenLabs has surpassed US$500 million in annual recurring revenue in Q1 2026, up from US$350 million at year-end 2025, driven by enterprises deploying voice agents across customer support, sales, and marketing. The AI voice start-up has now raised more than US$550 million in its Series D, adding institutional investors including BlackRock, Wellington, and Nvidia's venture arm, alongside a group of more than 30 entertainment figures including Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk. Clients include Meta, Salesforce, and Revolut.

Here’s why this matters: ElevenLabs' revenue trajectory is one of the clearest indicators of where enterprise AI spend is flowing right now: voice. The jump from US$350 million to US$500 million ARR in a single quarter reflects genuine commercial deployment, not pilot programmes, with some of the world's largest companies embedding voice agents into core business operations. The celebrity investor roster is easy to dismiss as optics, but entertainment figures with a vested interest in how their voices are used in an AI world are exactly the kind of validators that accelerate mainstream adoption. For audio and media industries, the voice layer of the internet is being built right now.

2. Anthropic Says Finance Is Its Next Frontier

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed at the company's developer conference that revenue and usage grew 80-fold in Q1 2026 on an annualised basis, far exceeding the 10x growth the company had planned for, and straining compute infrastructure to its limits. The disclosure came alongside Anthropic's financial services push: ten new AI agents for banks and insurers, covering tasks from pitchbook creation to credit memo drafting, alongside a joint stage appearance with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Financial institutions now represent 40% of Anthropic's top 50 customers and its second-largest enterprise revenue vertical after technology.

Here’s why this matters: The 80x growth figure reframes every other Anthropic story this week. The valuation trajectory, the compute deals with Amazon and SpaceX, the Wall Street push, all of it makes more sense when you understand the demand curve underneath it. Amodei's warning about SaaS incumbents is the line the industry should pay closest attention to: companies that meet AI head-on can perform better than ever, while others risk becoming obsolete. For media and technology businesses still treating AI as a cost tool rather than a growth engine, that is a direct challenge. The firms that move fastest to embed AI into their core value proposition will not just survive the disruption Amodei is describing, they will define what comes next.

3. James Murdoch Bids US$300 Million on Vox Podcasts

James Murdoch's investment firm Lupa Systems is in advanced talks to acquire New York magazine and Vox Media's podcast network for US$300 million or more. The deal would hand Murdoch one of digital media's most resilient magazine brands, with offshoots including The Cut, Vulture, and Intelligencer, alongside a 40-plus podcast network home to Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Talks could still fall apart. If completed, it would return New York magazine to the Murdoch family for the first time since 1991, when Rupert Murdoch's News Corp divested it after a decade and a half.

Here’s why this matters: The Vox Media sale process is a precise reflection of where digital media finds itself in 2026: breaking apart rather than scaling together. The bundle that made sense a decade ago, when aggregating audiences across verticals created advertising leverage, no longer holds. Podcasts and publishing attract different buyers with different playbooks, and Vox's board has concluded they are worth more separately. For James Murdoch, the acquisition is a deliberate pivot away from his family's conservative media empire toward something editorially distinct. The more significant question is what a Murdoch-backed independent podcast network, with Tribeca already in the portfolio, could become and whether it represents a new model for premium audio media ownership.

Still Curious?

Our Pursuit Of Better

a16z crypto has raised a US$2.2 billion fifth fund, bringing its total to US$9.8 billion, committing to remain "dedicated 100% to crypto entrepreneurs" despite a cooling market. VC investment in crypto start-ups fell to US$5 billion in Q1 2026, down from US$6 billion a year prior, as competitors like Paradigm pivot into AI and robotics.

SpaceX has signed an agreement with Anthropic to use all compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data centre, providing access to more than 300 megawatts and over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs within the month. The deal has enabled Anthropic to double Claude Code's five-hour rate limits, remove peak-hours restrictions for Pro and Max users, and raise API rate limits considerably for Claude Opus models.

Corgi, a business insurance start-up covering general liability, cyber, and AI liability, has raised a US$160 million Series B led by TCV at a US$1.3 billion valuation - just four months after closing its US$108 million Series A. Founded in 2024 and a Y Combinator alumnus, the company has now raised US$268 million in total and counts Deel and Artisan among its clients.

The Story of Omny Studio’s Podcast Pivot

Melbourne, 2011. Three founders have a big idea: personalised radio that knows your taste in music, your location, your favourite content. This a story of having the courage to pivot, and the optimism to make it work.

Meliora Team Spotlight

Lee Ellison - USA

Lee is a dynamic and accomplished CEO with a track record of driving rapid revenue growth and securing market leadership across both start-up ventures and publicly listed technology firms.

Anthony Abbott

Anthony is a strategic and outcomes-driven product leader with over 20 years of international business experience in the media and entertainment sector, specialising in digital audio and streaming.

The Pursuit of Better, Together

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