🔊 Voice AI just hit $11 billion

Plus Meta tests content without creators, while Apple doubts its AI future

February 05, 2026

Reading time: 5 minutes

🗞️In this edition

  • The Voice AI Company Nobody Noticed Just Hit $11 Billion

  • Sponsored: Hugo – The AI Agent That Takes Over Customer Support

  • Meta Just Launched the App That Kills the Creator Economy

  • Apple's C-Suite Just Realized They're Losing the AI War

  • In other AI news –

    • Three AI Giants Made the Same Infrastructure Bet

    • Microsoft's $60M Copilot Push Can't Stop the User Exodus

    • The $1B AI Startup Tracking Crime for the FBI

  • 4 must-try AI tools

The voice AI company nobody noticed just hit $11 billion. Meta is testing what happens when humans stop creating content entirely. Apple's leadership is privately questioning if they can win AI at all.

These aren't separate stories. They're the same inflection point playing out in real time.

One company cracked the interface problem everyone else is still talking about. Another is running the experiment the entire industry is too scared to run. The third built an empire on hardware and just realized the ground underneath might be shifting.

Here's what matters: some companies know exactly what they're building. Others are still figuring out which way to point.

That gap is everything. This edition shows you who's who.

Source: Eleven Labs

What's happening:

ElevenLabs raised $500 million at an $11 billion valuation. That's triple what the company was worth just one year ago.

Andreessen Horowitz quadrupled its investment. ICONIQ tripled down, and Sequoia led the round with Andrew Reed joining the board.

The company closed 2025 with $330 million in revenue. Deutsche Telekom, Square, the Ukrainian government, and Revolut use its voice agents for everything from customer support to citizen engagement.

Co-founder Mati Staniszewski said they're building toward an IPO. The plan is expanding beyond voice to create agents that can talk, type, and take action.

Why this is important:

While everyone was watching ChatGPT, ElevenLabs became the infrastructure powering voice AI for over a billion users. Meta, Epic Games, Salesforce, MasterClass all run on it.

This is the bet that wins. For decades humans clicked buttons to talk to machines, ElevenLabs is flipping that completely, making machines speak human.

The money tells you everything. When a16z quadruples down and ICONIQ triples their position, they're not betting on better voices, they're positioning for agents that replace entire operations.

The $11 billion assumes the interface for everything becomes conversation. If they're right, this is the infrastructure play of the decade, and most people still don't know it exists.

Hugo is an AI-native support agent built to fully resolve customer conversations end-to-end. Set it up in under 2 minutes, plug into your existing tools, and let it handle repetitive support without charging per ticket.

Why teams are switching:
• No $1-per-ticket pricing, predictable costs
• Resolves conversations automatically, not just deflects them
• Proven results: up to 80% of conversations handled without human escalation
• Built by the team behind Crisp, designed for real production use

Stop paying for every support interaction.

Source: Social Media Today

What's happening:

The app is called Vibes. It launched in Brazil and Mexico after usage inside Meta AI tripled in three months. People aren't just making these videos, they're obsessed with them.

Here's what makes it different. You can grab anyone's AI video, change the music, flip the style, add new visuals, and post your version. It's a remix culture where the original doesn't matter anymore.

Meta says content generation jumped ten times since they made this easy. Now they're betting an entire app on it.

Why this is important:

Meta is running an experiment that nobody else has the guts to try. They're asking the most uncomfortable question in tech right now: do social feeds actually need humans?

Every platform says AI should help creators make better content. Meta is testing if you need creators at all. The feed is the content. The algorithm is the artist.

The early numbers are terrifying if you're a creator. Usage tripled the moment Meta made it easy to generate videos. If people keep watching, every major platform will copy this within two years.

But here's what everyone is missing. This isn't about generation, it's about remixing. People aren't starting from scratch, they're taking someone else's output and making it theirs. Creation becomes curation. Authorship becomes remixing skill.

Comments from the editor:

The genius move here is the isolation. Meta could have buried this inside Instagram or Facebook. Instead, they made it a separate app. That gives them clean data on what people actually want.

The timing is wild. YouTube just started cracking down on AI spam. Other platforms are fighting synthetic content. Meta is building entire infrastructure for it.

Here's what makes this strategic. The creator economy runs on scarcity. You need skill, equipment, time to make good content. Meta is testing if abundance kills that model entirely.

This is the test that determines the next decade of content. We're highlighting it because the answer rewrites everything we know about social media.

Source: Gizmodo

What's happening:

Apple's senior executives are privately questioning whether the company has what it takes to win in an AI-first world. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that leadership sees their hardware-first approach as a potential liability.

The evidence is piling up. AI boss John Giannandrea is leaving. Apple surrendered to Google to get a functional AI model for Siri. Meta is shipping AI-powered smart glasses while Apple watches from the sidelines.

Apple's response? A "patchwork approach" of wearables and smart home gadgets centered around a redesigned Siri. No unified vision. Just incremental updates.

Why this is important:

This isn't just another tech company struggling with AI. This is Apple admitting their entire business model might not work for what comes next.

Apple built $3 trillion on controlling hardware. But AI doesn't care about ecosystems. Users will talk to whatever model gives the best answers, on whatever hardware is most convenient.

Apple's "patchwork approach" means they don't know what to build. The companies winning AI aren't hedging. OpenAI bet everything on models. Meta is building hardware specifically for AI.

When the hardware king admits they might not have the right ingredients, it tells you how fast this shift is happening.

👩🏼‍🚒Discover mind-blowing AI tools

  1. AgentGPT - An AI-powered tool that lets users deploy autonomous agents capable of completing a wide range of tasks from drafting emails to planning trips

  2. Vidnoz Headshot Generator - Allows users to create highly realistic AI-generated headshots within minutes

  3. BannerGPT - A tool that reads and comprehends your blog posts to generate compelling and relevant banner images

  4. TextCraft AI - An email management tool designed to improve productivity and streamline email communication

Voice infrastructure at $11 billion. AI-only content feeds going standalone. Hardware giants publicly questioning their own playbook.

What ties these together? Conviction. ElevenLabs didn't hedge—they bet everything on voice and won. Meta isn't testing—they're building an entire app to see if creators are optional. Apple isn't leading—they're admitting uncertainty at the top.

The distance between decisive action and hesitation is growing faster than anyone can catch up. A year from now, the companies that moved with clarity today will be unreachable.

Watch who's betting without safety nets. That's where the future is being built.

If you have any feedback for us, please reply and let us know how we did. We're always looking to improve.

How did we like this version?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Interested in featuring your services with us? Email us at [email protected]