ElevenLabs opens Sydney office, names Damian Naughton ANZ general manager

ElevenLabs has opened its first regional office in Sydney and named former Slack executive Damian Naughton as general manager for Australia and New Zealand. The voice AI company plans to triple local headcount, with engineering hires the priority.

The London-headquartered firm sells generative voice models to enterprises and developers. The Sydney site is its first dedicated outpost in the region.

ElevenLabs already counts more than 750,000 users across Australia and New Zealand. Those users have generated more than 300 million audio clips and held about 2.4 million conversations through the company’s agent platform. About 37,000 developers in the region build with the ElevenLabs API, and the underlying models cover more than 70 languages.

“Australia and New Zealand are exciting markets for us. We’re seeing real demand for voice agents right across product, support, sales, and operations,” ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski said in a statement. “We’re expanding our local teams, particularly engineering, so we can build alongside those companies and get them into production faster.”

Naughton joins from Slack, where he was a regional vice president responsible for enterprise growth in the region. At ElevenLabs he will run local sales, customer success, and partnerships, and report into the company’s international operations team.

“We’re at an inflection point for AI adoption across both Australia and New Zealand. Organisations here are among the most keen early adopters of new technologies,” Naughton said. “It’s an incredibly timely moment for us to plant a stake in the ground locally with an office and dedicated team here.”

Customers already in production

ElevenLabs cited Australia Post, Xero, Employment Hero, Heidi Health, and Andromeda Robotics as Australian customers using its voice models. Use cases include contact-centre automation, clinical-note dictation, accessibility tools, and consumer-facing AI agents.

Naughton said local enterprises have started shifting from AI proofs-of-concept to production deployment. “Organisations are looking to move from experimenting with AI to genuinely running with it, and voice AI is one of the most immediate yet high-impact places to start,” he said.

The pattern echoes findings from the National AI Centre’s launch of its AI.gov.au platform earlier this week. The Centre catalogued an uptick in production AI use among ASX-listed companies and federal agencies.

A bigger Sydney bet

The Sydney opening adds ANZ to a recent run of regional launches by ElevenLabs. The company has stood up offices in Korea and Spain over the past year as it courts non-English-language enterprise customers. ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 and released its first human-like voice model in 2023.

The company reported $US500 million in annual recurring revenue at last disclosure, the figure cited in its briefing notes for the Sydney announcement. ElevenLabs has not broken out Australian revenue separately. A spokesperson declined to give the local figure when asked.

OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic all ship voice or audio products. A tier of specialists has emerged that sells lower-latency, higher-quality models to companies that do not want to depend on the hyperscalers for what is, increasingly, a customer-facing layer.

The Sydney office puts ElevenLabs alongside Pipedrive’s recent local data centre push. It also follows a long list of US- and Europe-headquartered SaaS vendors that have set up Australian operations in the past 18 months. Enterprise buyers have asked harder questions about data residency, local support, and AU-time-zone account management.

Hiring brief

Engineering hires are the priority, Staniszewski said. Applied roles will follow. Naughton will lead regional sales, partnerships and customer success. The Sydney office is expected to host technical staff, account executives and partner managers within the year. ElevenLabs has not given a final headcount target beyond the tripling commitment.

Sydney has a small but growing cluster of voice AI developers, including Australian-headquartered firms working on call-centre automation and accessibility. Several global competitors run local sales teams remotely. ElevenLabs is the first of the well-funded specialist voice AI vendors to commit a physical regional headquarters in the country.

Paid conversion the next test

The 750,000 ANZ users figure includes free-tier sign-ups and trial accounts. The company has not disclosed how many of those convert to paid subscriptions or enterprise contracts. Naughton’s job is to move more of the base onto invoiced contracts and lift average contract values among existing customers.

Regulatory exposure is also rising. The Office of the eSafety Commissioner has flagged synthetic-voice scams as a harm vector. The federal government’s response to the Privacy Act review has signalled tighter rules on biometric data, including voiceprints. ElevenLabs, like OpenAI and Google, has built consent and provenance tooling into its enterprise offering. The legal frameworks for synthetic voice in financial services, healthcare and political communications are still being written.

For now the bet is straightforward. ElevenLabs has the customers. It has a senior local hire from a SaaS firm that built its Australian business through enterprise channel work. The next four quarters will say whether those two pieces fit together.