ElevenLabs Opens a Sydney Office. The Voice AI Race in Australia Just Got Real.
The voice AI platform has appointed Damian Naughton as GM ANZ and opened its first Australian office. With 750,000 regional users and clients including Australia Post and Xero, ElevenLabs is betting that voice is the next interface layer for enterprise.
Voice AI is not a novelty feature any more. When Australia Post and Xero are using it in production, the technology has crossed from experimental to operational.
ElevenLabs has opened its first Australian office in Sydney and appointed Damian Naughton as General Manager for Australia and New Zealand. Naughton comes from Slack, where he led the ANZ business through its enterprise growth phase. The hire signals that ElevenLabs sees the region as a priority market, not an afterthought.
The numbers back up the move. ElevenLabs claims 750,000 users across Australia and New Zealand, with enterprise clients including Australia Post, Xero and Employment Hero already using the platform. The company has raised over $250 million in venture funding and is valued at north of $3 billion. It is the most well-funded pure-play voice AI company in the market.
ElevenLabs users across Australia and New Zealand before the local office even opened
The product suite covers text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing and real-time voice agents. For marketing teams, the immediate applications are audio content production, multilingual campaign localisation and conversational AI for customer service. The cost and speed advantages over traditional voiceover production are significant. What used to take a studio booking, talent fees and post-production can now happen in minutes.
Naughton's appointment follows a pattern. ElevenLabs has been hiring regional GMs across Asia-Pacific as it builds out its enterprise sales motion. The Sydney office is the latest in a series of market-by-market expansions.
Why it matters
Voice is becoming an interface layer. Search is moving to voice queries. Customer service is moving to voice agents. Content consumption is shifting to audio formats. Brands that have built their entire content strategy around text and image are going to need a voice layer, and soon.
The barrier to entry for voice AI has dropped dramatically. ElevenLabs pricing starts at under $100 per month for business use. That puts broadcast-quality voice generation within reach of any marketing team, not just enterprise budgets. The question is no longer whether to use voice AI. It is which use case to start with.
What to do about it
Audit your content pipeline for audio opportunities. Product explainers, customer onboarding, multilingual support and podcast production are the obvious starting points. If you are producing video content, the dubbing capability alone could open new markets without reshooting. The technology is mature enough for production use. The Sydney office means local support is now available.