The second installment of our new Founders & Emerging Leaders series, separate from our established-company “New CEOs to Watch” coverage. This one covers Europe.
Mati Staniszewski — ElevenLabs
Staniszewski co-founded ElevenLabs, a voice AI company, in 2022 with his childhood best friend Piotr Dąbkowski — the two Polish entrepreneurs originally motivated by a specific, mundane frustration: in Poland, entire foreign films are traditionally dubbed with a single monotone voice reading over the original audio, rather than proper localized voice acting. That specific, relatable problem — not an abstract AI thesis — was the actual starting point, with the ambition of eventually enabling real-time translation and dubbing in the same voice as the original speaker.
When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Staniszewski and Dąbkowski recognized the underlying technology had finally caught up to what their original idea needed. The company has since raised funding from Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz among others, reaching a reported valuation of $11 billion by February 2026.
Why he made this list: the origin story here is unusually concrete — a specific, first-hand frustration with a real cultural product, not a generic “AI will change everything” pitch — and that specificity is precisely what let the product stay focused as the underlying technology matured around it.
Torsten Reil — Helsing
Reil, a German computational biologist educated at Oxford, co-founded Helsing in March 2021 alongside Gundbert Scherf and Niklas Köhler, building AI software and hardware for European defense — including strike drones, underwater surveillance systems, and battlefield decision-making software. This isn’t Reil’s first successful company: he previously founded NaturalMotion, an Oxford spin-out that became one of the UK’s most successful games technology companies before being acquired by Zynga for $527 million in 2014.
Helsing reached an $18 billion valuation in a July 2026 funding round, and Reil has been publicly outspoken about the category he’s building in — including warning, as co-CEO, that Europe’s broader defense-tech sector may be developing a genuine funding bubble, a notably candid position for a founder to take about his own industry rather than simply promoting it.
Why he made this list: a proven, successful exit behind him gave Reil the credibility and capital to make a genuinely higher-stakes second bet — European defense sovereignty — and his willingness to publicly flag risk in his own sector, rather than only hype it, is a rarer trait among founders at this scale than it should be.
Next in this series
Asia is next, including India’s youngest CEO of a newly public company.
