ElevenLabs opens Singapore hub for Southeast Asia and begins local hiring

ElevenLabs has officially launched a Singapore office to serve as its Southeast Asia hub, six months after deploying local data-residency infrastructure in the region. The company, which builds text-to-speech models and voice agents, is already working with a roster of enterprise customers across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. They include the SME financing platform Funding Societies, the buy-now-pay-later service Atome, the digital banks Boost Bank and Salmon Group, the media conglomerate MNC Group, and the AI startups Rezonate and Level3AI.

Infrastructure first

In July the company switched on data residency in Singapore, letting organizations in the region host models locally with a zero-retention option, lower latency to East Asia, and SOC 2 compliance. Chief executive and co-founder Mati Staniszewski said communication in the region is "hyper-local" and models need to be tuned to specific languages, dialects and cultural context — not just translated, but sounding natural in every market.

A client list that shows range

Funding Societies, the region's largest digital financing platform for small and medium businesses, uses ElevenLabs voice agents to screen and qualify leads across five markets; human representatives step in only after the bot finishes the initial conversation. Atome runs agent-to-customer engagement workflows on the same infrastructure. Rezonate, which operates in 60 percent of Singapore's public hospitals, is building conversational experiences on the platform. Level3AI, a Singapore startup, automates long, complex calls such as appointment booking through ElevenAgents. AI Rudder, a WhatsApp business solution, runs TTS and custom voices across finance, logistics and retail.

Hiring locally

Eugene Liang, who leads Asia operations, noted that multilingual and multicultural environments are the default in the region, and the company is positioned to meet that with AI that speaks the region's languages "the way people speak them." ElevenLabs is advertising open roles in research, engineering, sales, solutions and other functions — a move that signals an intention to build a substantial local team rather than manage the region remotely.

What the announcement leaves out

The release does not disclose comparative benchmarks against local or global competitors, does not specify which languages and dialects are supported at production level, and does not detail enterprise pricing for the region. Given that the Southeast Asian market is already crowded with local TTS solutions — some open source, some offered as managed services — the real test will be sustained production adoption, not the launch itself.