ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski says voice is becoming the next major interface for AI – the way people will increasingly interact with machines as models move beyond text and screens.

Speaking at Web Summit in Doha, Staniszewski told TechCrunch voice models like those developed by ElevenLabs have recently moved beyond simply mimicking human speech — including emotion and intonation — to working in tandem with the reasoning capabilities of large language models. The result, he argued, is a shift in how people interact with technology. 

In the years ahead, he said, “hopefully all our phones will go back in our pockets, and we can immerse ourselves in the real world around us, with voice as the mechanism that controls technology.”

That vision fueled ElevenLabs’s $500 million raise this week at an $11 billion valuation, and it is increasingly shared across the AI industry. OpenAI and Google have both made voice a central focus of their next-generation models, while Apple appears to be quietly building voice-adjacent, always-on technologies through acquisitions like Q.ai. As AI spreads into wearables, cars, and other new hardware, control is becoming less about tapping screens and more about speaking, making voice a key battleground for the next phase of AI development. 

Iconiq Capital general partner Seth Pierrepont echoed that view onstage at Web Summit, arguing that while screens will continue to matter for gaming and entertainment, traditional input methods like keyboards are starting to feel “outdated.”

And as AI systems become more agentic, Pierrepont said, the interaction itself will also change, with models gaining guardrails, integrations, and context needed to respond with less explicit prompting from users. 

Staniszewski pointed to that agentic shift as one of the biggest changes underway. Rather than spelling out every instruction, he said future voice systems will increasingly rely on persistent memory and context built up over time, making interactions feel more natural and requiring less effort from users. 

That evolution, he added, will influence how voice models are deployed. While high-quality audio models have largely lived in the cloud, Staniszewski said ElevenLabs is working toward a hybrid approach that blends cloud and on-device processing — a move aimed at supporting new hardware, including headphones and other wearables, where voice becomes a constant companion rather than a feature you decide when to engage with. 

ElevenLabs is already partnering with Meta to bring its voice technology to products, including Instagram and Horizon Worlds, the company’s virtual-reality platform. Staniszewski said he would also be open to working with Meta on its Ray-Ban smart glasses as voice-driven interfaces expand into new form factors. 

But as voice becomes more persistent and embedded in everyday hardware, it opens the door to serious concerns around privacy, surveillance, and how much personal data voice-based systems will store as they move closer to users’ daily lives — something companies like Google have already been accused of abusing.

An AI lab called Fundamental emerged from stealth on Thursday, offering a new foundation model to solve an old problem: how to draw insights from the huge quantities of structured data produced by enterprises. By combining the old systems of predictive AI with more contemporary tools, the company believes it can reshape how large enterprises analyze their data.

“While LLMs have been great at working with unstructured data, like text, audio, video, and code, they don’t work well with structured data like tables,” CEO Jeremy Fraenkel told TechCrunch. “With our model Nexus, we have built the best foundation model to handle that type of data.”

The idea has already drawn significant interest from investors. The company is emerging from stealth with $255 million in funding at a $1.2 billion valuation. The bulk of it comes from the recent $225 million Series A round led by Oak HC/FT, Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures; Hetz Ventures also participated in the Series A, with angel funding from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras, and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel.

Called a large tabular model (LTM) rather than a large language model (LLM), Fundamental’s Nexus breaks from contemporary AI practices in a number of significant ways. The model is deterministic — that is, it will give the same answer every time it is asked a given question — and doesn’t rely on the transformer architecture that defines models from most contemporary AI labs. Fundamental calls it a foundation model because it goes through the normal steps of pre-training and fine-tuning, but the result is something profoundly different from what a client would get when partnering with OpenAI or Anthropic.

Those differences are important because Fundamental is chasing a use case where contemporary AI models often falter. Because Transformer-based AI models can only process data that’s within their context window, they often have trouble reasoning over extremely large datasets — analyzing a spreadsheet with billions of rows, for instance. But that kind of enormous structured dataset is common within large enterprises, creating a significant opportunity for models that can handle the scale.

As Fraenkel sees it, that’s a huge opportunity for Fundamental. Using Nexus, the company can bring contemporary techniques to big data analysis, offering something more powerful and flexible than the algorithms that are currently in use.

“You can now have one model across all of your use cases, so you can now expand massively the number of use cases that you tackle,” he told TechCrunch. “And on each one of those use cases, you get better performance than what you would otherwise be able to do with an army of data scientists.”

That promise has already brought in a number of high-profile contracts, including seven-figure contracts with Fortune 100 clients. The company has also entered into a strategic partnership with AWS that will allow AWS users to deploy Nexus directly from existing instances.

A data breach at government technology giant Conduent appears to affect far more people than first disclosed, with the number of victims potentially stretching to dozens of millions of people across the United States.

The January 2025 ransomware attack, which knocked out Conduent’s operations for several days, is now known to affect at least 15.4 million people in Texas alone, accounting for about half of the state’s population. Conduent said in October that 4 million people across the state were affected.

Another 10.5 million people are affected across Oregon, per the state’s attorney general. 

Conduent has also notified hundreds of thousands of people across Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and other states, according to data breach notifications seen by TechCrunch.

The stolen data includes individuals’ names, Social Security numbers, medical data, and health insurance information.

One of the largest government contractors today, Conduent handles and processes large amounts of personal and sensitive information on behalf of large corporations, government departments, and several U.S. states. The company says its technology and operational support services reach more than 100 million people in the United States across various government healthcare programs.

When contacted with several questions about the data breach, Conduent spokesperson Sean Collins provided a boilerplate statement that did not address the questions, nor did they answer if Conduent knows how many individuals are affected by the cyberattack. The spokesperson would not say if the breach affects more than 100 million people.

Collins said that the company has been working to “conduct a detailed analysis of the affected files to identify the personal information” taken in the breach but would not say how many data breach notifications the company has sent out to date.

Little else is known about the breach, and the company has disclosed few details. Conduent disclosed the cyberattack in April, months after hackers knocked out the company’s systems, which resulted in outages to government services across the United States.

The Safeway ransomware gang took credit for the breach, claiming to have stolen over 8 terabytes of data.

In a later SEC filing, the company said that the stolen datasets “contained a significant number of individuals’ personal information associated with our clients’ end-users,” referring to its corporate and government customers.

Conduent also said it is continuing to notify individuals whose data was stolen in the breach, and plans to conclude alerting individuals by early 2026. The company did not give a more specific timeline.

Do you know more about the Conduent cyberattack? You can contact Zack Whittaker on Signal via the username zackwhittaker.1337 or by email: zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com.