Who is Ashley Kramer? Former OpenAI executive joins Voice AI Startup ElevenLabs as first chief revenue officer

Ashley Kramer, a former OpenAI executive, has joined artificial intelligence voice startup ElevenLabs as its first chief revenue officer. She will lead the company's global revenue operations as it looks to expand its business among enterprise customers.

Kramer previously served as vice president of enterprise sales at OpenAI. Before joining the AI company, she held senior roles at technology firms including GitLab, Alteryx and Tableau, where she worked across sales, marketing and product. Earlier in her career, she also worked at Oracle and NASA.

According to ElevenLabs, Kramer has around two decades of experience working with high-growth technology companies. At OpenAI, she led enterprise sales at a time when revenue from business customers was growing faster than its consumer business, with the technology gaining wider adoption among Fortune 100 companies.

Kramer's appointment comes as ElevenLabs is increasingly shifting its focus towards businesses. Enterprise customers accounted for 55% of the company's revenue this year, compared with 40% last year. Chief Executive Officer Mati Staniszewski described the shift as an “inflection point.”

In her new role, Kramer will oversee ElevenLabs' global revenue function and partnerships while working with customers to shape the company's AI offerings for businesses.

“Ashley joins ElevenLabs at an important moment in our growth. Today, powerful AI models are widely available, but the next challenge is making AI useful, intuitive, and trusted in real-world interactions with people,” the company said in a blog post.

ElevenLabs said its AI agents now handle more than 15 million conversations globally each week. Its enterprise customers include Meta, Stripe, Klarna, Hasbro and Deutsche Telekom, with businesses using its technology across customer support, sales, marketing, product development and business operations.

What does ElevenLabs do?

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs develops AI models for voice and audio applications. Its technology is used to power AI agents for sales and customer service, narrate audiobooks and translate advertisements into different languages.

The company said in July that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) had crossed $600 million. ARR is an annualised measure of recurring revenue commonly used by startups to track growth.

ElevenLabs raised $300 million from investors led by Sequoia Capital in February at a valuation of $11 billion. The company has also held early discussions with investors about a transaction that would allow employees to sell shares and value the startup at about $22 billion, Bloomberg News previously reported.

What did Ashley Kramer say about joining ElevenLabs?

Kramer said her decision to leave OpenAI was made before the company's recent executive departures and was driven by her desire to join a “world-class team.”

“Solving how AI interacts with people will be one of the defining challenges of the AI era,” said Ashley Kramer, chief revenue officer at ElevenLabs. ”If AI sounds robotic, cold, or simply doesn't understand your intent, people won't trust it to help solve their problems. ElevenLabs is building the industry's leading human-AI interaction platform, whether that’s for businesses and customers, governments and citizens, or creatives and audiences. I'm excited to lead the work of getting that into the hands of enterprises around the world.”

"The majority of our business now comes from helping large companies streamline their operations and build new, revenue generating customer experiences," said Mati Staniszewski, cofounder and CEO of ElevenLabs. "Having led many of the teams we serve, Ashley deeply understands what our customers need and how we can deploy products that deliver value for them. I'm looking forward to working with Ashley as we scale ElevenLabs into a full platform for AI interaction across the enterprise.”

Kramer's appointment comes shortly after several senior executives left OpenAI, including chief revenue officer Denise Dresser, chief operating officer Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo, who oversaw much of the company's core business.

(With inputs from Bloomberg)