ElevenLabs: Talking the AI talk
It took IBM 68 years to reach a valuation of $22bn. Apple managed to hit that milestone in a mere 28 years. Despite being considerably less of a household name, ElevenLabs has done it in four years, making it one of the 10 most valuable AI labs outside China. The London-based company was founded by two Polish engineers, and it specialises in developing ultra-realistic and natural-sounding speech synthesis software using deep learning.
The inspiration for the company came from the founders’ frustration at watching American movies with dreadful voiceovers or inept dubbing. They imagined what it would be like if the actors could actually speak their language, so they ended up leaving their jobs at Google and Palantir to make it happen. One of the more obvious applications of the technology is for content creators who are pushing out their creations in their native language: they can now use ElevenLabs’ models to translate them into more than 90 languages spoken by around two-thirds of the world’s population.
Its Agents platform deploys interactive conversational chatbots for major customers including Klarna, Adobe and Deutsche Telekom, handling more than 15-million weekly automated interactions for complex tasks like processing refunds and scheduling appointments. The technology is not without controversy, with the potential for use in deepfakes such as an incident that purported to be Emma Watson reading from Mein Kampf, or AI-generated robocalls to voters ahead of the 2024 New Hampshire Democratic primary in the voice of Joe Biden, encouraging voters not to go out to vote on the day.
Nike: Walk of shame
Nike was the ancient Greek goddess of victory, which feels distinctly inappropriate for the world’s largest sportswear brand after the way it’s performed in the past five years. Much of the decline took place under the watch of former eBay boss John Donahoe, who conjured up an online direct-to-consumer sales pivot that handed market share on a silver platter to upstart rivals including On and Hoka. Company veteran Elliott Hill was hauled out of retirement to replace Donahoe, stop the rot and implement a turnaround, but it looks like it’ll be a while before the company returns to the glory days.
Nike’s share price has fallen 76% since its peak in 2021, while its global market share in sports footwear has tumbled from 29.2% in 2022 to 23.4% in 2025. It has lost its place in the S&P 100 after 18 years in the blue-chip index, and star striker Kylian Mbappé has transferred to On a mere two months after Nike launched a golden Mercurial Superfly boot to mark his achievement as the top goalscorer in the history of the Fifa World Cup.
This is the same route taken by Roger Federer after 24 years with Nike, while Spain’s World Cup-winning wunderkind, Lamine Yamal, has defected to adidas. Anti-American sentiment and increased local competition at the less expensive end of the market resulted in Nike’s revenue in China falling by 26%. In the US it has somehow managed to get hammered by Republicans for being too woke and by Democrats for not being woke enough. Its product design has slipped behind the competition, and it needs to up its game, pronto.
