ElevenLabs speaks more than 70 languages but its money speaks the same one
“Invoices, cards, tokens. The categories change but the principle doesn't: know where the money is going, remove the work around it, and make sure the spend is worth it.”
ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs set up bill pay in March 2024. Twelve days later, its books were being coded automatically.
Maciej Mylik had been the company's first finance hire for five months. What he had inherited was QuickBooks, an external accountant, two debit cards, and colleagues in more countries than the finance function had people.
That last part was not an accident of growth. ElevenLabs' first ten employees lived in ten different countries, because it hires the best voice researchers in the world and does not ask them to move. Today that policy supports more than 550 people across more than fifty countries, which left Maciej with a choice every globalising company gets offered and most of them accept. He could build a finance process for each country, or he could build one and refuse to build another.
He built one. An invoice that arrives in Poland moves through the same steps, in the same order, as one that arrives in Japan.
Ten people, ten countries, one shared inbox
Before Maciej, finance belonged to Victoria Weller, who runs operations at ElevenLabs. An astrophysicist by training, she had concluded that a career in physics meant either a desert or decades spent on something that might never work. She had met Mati Staniszewski, the company's co-founder and chief executive, at Palantir. When he left, she guessed what he was building and wrote to ask whether he needed operations help. She joined at ten people and picked up everything that was not research. Payroll was Mati himself, moving money into people's bank accounts one transfer at a time. Invoices went to an address anyone in the company could open.
Victoria remembers the arrangement with the amused disbelief of someone who knows the machinery should not have worked for as long as it did. "I was finance, accounting and legal," she says. "There were ten of us. Looking back, it seems a bit wild that I was doing any of it."
A company of ten can survive on trust, improvisation and one person keeping the machinery in their head. Somewhere in the fifties, that stops being a system and starts becoming a liability; ElevenLabs went past that point inside a year.
When Maciej arrived in October 2023 as employee number 30, every bill took two passes by hand. "I coded it in our accounting system. I manually entered the details in our bank. I manually pressed pay. And it had no controls whatsoever."
But the thing that compounded was not the keystrokes. It was jurisdiction. A company cannot scale if every country gets its own finance process, and each new country arrives with its own tax regime, accounting rules and currency, and its own perfectly good reasons to be treated as the exception.
“One flow in Poland, another in the UK, and then you start thinking about Sri Lanka as the fifty-first. At some point your operations simply break. A single flow across all of them is existential."
— Victoria Weller, Operations at ElevenLabs
Why the invoices came first
Almost every finance lead at a company growing this fast buys a card program first. Maciej went the other way, because he had already worked out which system would fail soonest and what the conventional fix would cost.
Historically, he points out, you needed local teams to manage local expenses. "Without efficient tools, that is the only way you get from one country to fifty in three years, and it is a cost we had already decided not to pay."
So the first Ramp product ElevenLabs adopted was bill pay. He configured it and was running invoices through it the same day.
“I wasn't shopping for a card program. I wanted one tool that could take several workflows off my desk, and it was the only one where the OCR actually worked on a real invoice."
— Maciej Mylik, Finance at ElevenLabs
What he was really buying was fewer things to keep alive. "Every tool you add is another integration to maintain," he says. "I was picking the cornerstone of our payment infrastructure: one ERP integration, one banking integration, and room to grow into."
What that bought was not speed. It was the ability to say no the next time a country wanted a finance process of its own. Invoices stopped landing in a shared inbox and started landing in a queue, coded against the right entity before anyone touched them. Approval routing stopped depending on who happened to be awake in which timezone. Most finance software forces a bad choice here, and Maciej is pointed about it: approvals are either too crude to be useful or so intricate that people route around them.
Approval routing stopped depending on who happened to be awake in which timezone. Most finance software forces a bad choice here, and Maciej is pointed about it: approvals are either too crude to be useful or so intricate that people route around them.
"With Ramp you can start with something that works and only complicate it as you need it complex. The point solutions barely have that."
— Maciej Mylik, Finance at ElevenLabs
Only then did cards become obvious. Once the approval logic, entity structure and accounting sync were already in place, ElevenLabs could issue corporate cards to employees wherever they happened to work, without inventing a local process for each of them. The card became another expression of the same system: spend in the right currency, governed by the right controls, routed through the right program, and visible to finance before it turned into cleanup.
A 24-hour window in London
The proof of a single process is not that it is tidy. It is what happens when a deadline lands somewhere nobody was thinking about that morning. ElevenLabs is refurbishing its next office building in central London, and at one point the terms arrived with a 24-hour window to pay before the construction schedule slipped a month.
Victoria, who now runs operations across the whole company, approved it from Slack on her phone between meetings from a different time zone. "Not being blocked on me was critical for us to eventually move into that office together."
An audit passed at three people
“Our first audit came when there were three of us in finance. For a company growing this fast, that is pretty much unheard of."
— Maciej Mylik, Finance at ElevenLabs
The records held up because they were built as the money moved, not reconstructed once the auditors were booked. Receipts are required at the point of spend, and a card stops working without one. Coding happens on the way through. Everything lands in NetSuite as it goes, which meant there was nothing to assemble at the end.
177 approvers, one processor
The shape of the operation explains it. 177 people at ElevenLabs approved a bill in the last twelve months. One person processes them. The company distributed the judgement and concentrated none of the work, across thousands of bills a year.
Nobody uploads the invoices: 99% of them arrive on their own. And 99.8% of card transactions are coded without a person touching them.
The money that stopped sitting still
The same discipline shows up in what the company earns rather than spends. ElevenLabs has earned back nearly $890,000 in Ramp cashback and Ramp Checking Account* yield, all of it money that actually moved.
Maciej is dry about the second half. "It's just a regular bank account that pays you more interest than any other." The point underneath is about access rather than yield. Cash sweeps, he notes, are normally reserved for very large organisations, "not companies of 500 people with no dedicated treasury department."
The cost category nobody had a system for
Then there is the question only this customer would have thought to ask.
ElevenLabs has bought from fifteen AI vendors since 2024. Until this spring Maciej could see that spending only by opening each vendor's dashboard in turn and adding it up by hand. He switched on Ramp AI Token Spend Management in May, connected Anthropic, OpenAI and Cursor within three minutes of each other, and can now watch a hundred and fifty-five distinct models in one place.
His reason sounds casual. "It was a curiosity thing." His reason for wanting it early is not. Tokens can multiply in a day in a way almost no other cost category can, and a company can spend a great deal before anyone thinks to look.
He will tell you he does not check it as often as he probably should, which is arguably the point. The reason to instrument a cost category is not that you are watching it this week. It is that on the day you finally need the history, it is already there.
"AI spend is no different from any other spend. You need it observable, and you need it to yield results."
— Maciej Mylik, Finance at ElevenLabs
Where a model is allowed to work
He applies the same test to where models are allowed to work. He lets one code the card spend: Ramp's accounting agent picks the general ledger account on a third of all of ElevenLabs' transactions, and >88% of what it picks reaches NetSuite unchanged.
Deterministic rules his team wrote handle the bulk of the remainder. He has not let a model approve a payment, and Ramp's approval agent has never once acted on an ElevenLabs bill. Victoria is candid that broader guardrails on AI use are a next step rather than a finished one. The exceptions get the same treatment: when a sync last month hit an accounting period ElevenLabs had already closed, it stopped and waited for a person, which is what a closed period is for.
The fifty-first country
Victoria's fifty-first country is not a thought experiment. ElevenLabs opened two more legal entities this year, in the UAE and India, and neither of them needed a new process, a local finance hire, or a conversation about how things are done there. The invoices arrive in the same inbox. The approvals route through the same chain. The books close in the same place they always have.
That is the return on the decision Maciej made in his first months, and it compounds in a direction most finance teams never get to experience. The expensive part was building the system once. Every country after it is a configuration, not a project.
It is also why he talks about his own team the way ElevenLabs talks about its research. Nine or ten people, at a company past 550, and he describes that as a starting position rather than a ceiling. The ambition he states is not to stay small. It is to still be the leanest finance team in the room on the day ElevenLabs is a public company, and a more accurate one for being automated.
“We don't want to build at the frontier only in research and product. We want it in every function we have, including this one. Which means breaking the stereotype that a finance team scales with the company."
— Maciej Mylik, Finance at ElevenLabs
Ready to build the system beneath speed like ElevenLabs?
The lesson is not that ElevenLabs moved fast; it is that finance stayed simple enough to keep moving as the company got more complicated.
- Fix accounts payable before cards. Cards are visible and AP is not, which is exactly why AP is the one that quietly breaks first.
- Refuse the second process. The moment one jurisdiction gets its own workflow, every jurisdiction after it has a precedent to point at.
- Distribute the judgement, not the work. 177 approvers and one processor is a deliberate shape, not an accident.
- Buy for the company you will be. Maciej chose a platform he could grow into rather than the tool that solved October 2023.
ElevenLabs started with bill pay and never built a second process. You don't need fifty countries for that to matter. The decision gets made at the second one.
