ElevenLabs launched two new speech models on Monday, called ElevenLabs v4 and v4 Turbo, offering more expression control, lower latency for voice agents, and support for more than 90 languages.

The company released its v3 model last year, and teased the model at an event in Warsaw earlier this year. For the v4 generation of models, ElevenLabs is adopting a new architecture that allows for better control and faster cloning. The company said that with v4, users will be able to clone a voice with just 10 seconds of audio.

On the creative side, the model handles voice identity better over longer chunks of text. It also keeps the context of the text in mind while reading it aloud to change expressions. ElevenLabs introduced inline tags to define expression with v3, and is expanding those tags in v4, letting users stack multiple tags and having the model follow the sequence.

The previous version supported 70 languages, and ElevenLabs has worked to get that number up to 90 languages with the new version. The startup said that it observed the biggest quality jump in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin and Cantonese.

ElevenLabs has scaled its enterprise calling business rapidly over the last year, with more than 55% of its business coming from large companies. The company said that the new model is suited for voice agents, as the new version has lower latency to allow for more fluid conversation. Plus, the v4 can start generating audio as soon as the LLM behind it starts generating answers. What’s more, the model can also handle confrontations, escalations, and holds differently for better issue resolution.

Competition in speech models has ramped up as startups like Cartesia, Deepgram, Fish Audio, Boson, and WellSaid Labs have created expressive speech models. Big companies like Google and OpenAI have also improved their voice models.

ElevenLabs raised $500 million earlier this year from Sequoia earlier this year, in a round led by Sequoia that valued the company at $11 billion. There are already rumors of a followup fundraising round that would value the company at $22 billion. ElevenLabs annualized revenue run rate has climbed from roughly $330 million at the start of the year to over $600 million. The company has aggressively hired personnel in different markets such as India, Europe, and Brazil, as its headcount has reached over 800.

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, the company’s co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski said that the company is aiming for an IPO “in the next years,” but didn’t commit to a timeline.

It’s only been a month since AI assistant startup Instinct announced a fundraise that valued it at $2.5 billion, and now the company has already raised another $1 billion, from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue, valuing the company at $10 billion.

The news of the company’s fundraising efforts was reported earlier this month by The Information. In a press release on Monday, Instinct confirmed this was a Series C round — a pretty quick growth round for a startup that launched its invite-only service in August 2026.

The quick fundraises demonstrate the fervor around a new class of consumer AI agents, which can not only answer questions and engage in conversations, but can actually get things done for their users, whether that’s booking travel plans or restaurant reservations, making purchases, paying bills, canceling subscriptions, conducting tedious research, ordering groceries, and more.

When asked to perform a task, Instinct uses its own phone number and computer. The company recently rolled out other new features, like “concierge: that can make phone calls for you, to manage things like making appointments at places that don’t offer online booking, as well as a “trusted person network” which allows one person’s Instinct agent to coordinate plans with their friends’ agents.

However, these capabilities come at a cost: Some users are questioning the amount of personal information they have to disclose to AI agents to gain access to such capabilities. Instinct’s initial version of its privacy policy was particularly worrisome due to its overreach. The policy has since been updated.

Despite its AI assistant’s viral adoption, Instinct is now facing fresh competition from Meta’s own AI assistant, Muse, which offers many similar features, plus a system that can deeply integrate with Meta’s social products. That means Muse can do much of what Instinct does, as well as tasks like monitoring and summarizing your Instagram DMs or Facebook Groups, keeping an eye on Marketplace listings, and more.

Such capabilities have sent Muse to the top of the U.S. app stores, where it has been downloaded millions of times. Instinct, which uses SMS and texting to communicate with its users, doesn’t have a mobile app yet. The startup has also not shared its user numbers or any growth metrics, but clearly its investors are seeing something they like.

Instinct declined to offer interviews with founder Noah Shinn alongside the fundraising news, but shared a statement attributed to him: “We’re building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life. This funding helps us bring Instinct to more people and continue building the future of personal AI. It’s an exciting, creative time, and we’re just getting started.”

SpaceX’s Starship rocket reached Earth orbit for the first time, though not without some drama along the way.

The company’s mega-rocket launched into space from South Texas early Monday morning and ticked all the early checkboxes for a successful takeoff. But shortly after the upper stage of the Ship separated, it lost one of its six Raptor engines.

While Starship could still reach orbit if it loses an engine, the company initially called off the attempt, only to decide to keep pushing just a few minutes later.

Reaching orbit is a critical milestone that could let SpaceX start using Starship for regular commercial missions, and, importantly, inch closer to its goal of making the mega-rocket fully reusable. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is orienting the entire company around Starship, which has become central to the company’s plans to perform moon missions for NASA, and far-out ideas like putting AI data center satellites in space.

SpaceX planned to have the Starship upper stage orbit the Earth six times over the next nine hours while deploying 26 third-generation Starlinks into its constellation of internet satellites. It’s not immediately clear if any of that plan changed with the delayed entry into Earth orbit.

The company was also able to make progress on returning the Super Heavy booster stage of the rocket back to the launchpad. After separating from the upper stage of Starship a few minutes into the flight, the booster returned to the Gulf coast and performed a simulated landing over the water. It was the cleanest simulated landing SpaceX has performed with the V3 version of Starship, which it started testing in May.

This story is developing…