> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What ElevenLabs and Ozone Reveal About UK Media Technology - URL: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/what-elevenlabs-and-ozone-reveal-about-uk-media-technology/ - Published: 2026-09-30T12:00:57.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-30T12:00:57.000Z - Description: The UK’s media technology landscape is splitting in two: AI companies are transforming how content is created, while publishers build new infrastructure to distribute, license and monetise it. The real opportunity lies where these two worlds collide. - Author: Sharoni Banerjee - Tags: Sector Spotlights *Investors are backing the tools that make content, while publishers build their own to distribute and monetise it. The gap between the two says a lot about who UK media technology is really being built for.* --- If you run a UK publisher and Google has put its AI deal on your desk, the terms are reportedly take-it-or-leave-it. The offer is understood to run for two years and to include confidentiality and no-sue clauses, and one major publisher weighing it noted it could exit on 90 days' notice. The deal arrives after Google's UK ad spend grew 7.5% to £21.5bn last year, while the figure for newsbrands and magazine publishers stood at around £1.1bn, down about 5%. The Guardian and the FT are among those to have signed, reportedly earning single-figure millions a year, and both depend largely on reader revenue. Publishers are weighing short-term cash against a bargain being rewritten around them, and the technology sector serving them is splitting in two. That decision sits inside a sector whose boundaries are still argued over. Definitions of media technology vary, and it broadly means technology that produces, stores or distributes media content. The industry often shortens it to **mediatech.** For this piece we divide **UK media technology** into two halves: the tools that make content, and the tools that get it to readers and pay for it. AI in media runs through both, which is why we think they are worth reading together.[ ](https://mooreks.co.uk/insights/what-is-media-technology/?ref=entrepreneurplus.co.uk) --- ## The pressure on digital publishing The strain on digital publishing is measurable, though uneven. An AOP study of eight major UK publishing groups, covering 10.8 billion pageviews, found news publishers averaging a quarterly decline in referral traffic of around 5%, against 18% for the consumer and B2B segment. Its authors project Google referrals to major UK publishers could fall by half by Q3 2027\. Chartbeat data shows the same divide by size: over two years, search referrals fell 60% for publishers with 1,000 to 10,000 daily page views, 47% for medium-sized ones and 22% for large ones. Some publishers are diversifying, and Future plc says only 27% of its sessions originate from Google search. A UK magazine group behind Elle and Good Housekeeping grew paid subscriptions 6% to pass one million and returned to profit. Publishers also disagree about how severe the problem is. One national newspaper's SEO director says AI Overview visibility has plateaued at around 12% of non-brand terms on mobile in the UK, against 19% in the US. The pressure is real and its scale is contested, and that shapes what publishers are willing to build or buy. --- ## Where UK media technology money is going The funding follows content creation, and ElevenLabs is the clearest case of AI in media attracting serious capital. It raised a $500 million Series D at an $11 billion valuation in February 2026, more than tripling the valuation from a year earlier, and closed 2025 with over $330 million in annual recurring revenue. Its enterprise customers include media companies such as the Washington Post and TIME, and publishing houses such as HarperCollins. Publishers are buyers of this technology as well as subjects of the AI shift around it.[ ](https://thetechfounders.co.uk/news/elevenlabs-raises-500m-in-funding-at-11-billion-valuation/?ref=entrepreneurplus.co.uk) ElevenLabs is also a case study in where a company belongs. Its co-founders attended UK universities and began their careers in London, and in 2024 the company opened a Wardour Street office, expecting London to grow from about 20 people to more than 100\. In September 2025 the company said its UK headcount had grown from 18 to 68 over the previous year, while its US headcount grew from 10 to 61\. A UK company, Eleven Labs Ltd, has been registered in London since January 2022\. The parent, ElevenLabs Inc., is described as legally incorporated in the US. > *"We can't think of a better place to open our central hub."* — ***Mati Staniszewski, CEO and co-founder, ElevenLabs, on opening its London office, August 2024*** Synthesia, created in 2017 and valued at $4 billion after its January 2026 round, sells AI video mainly for training, internal communications and marketing, and targets more than $200 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Both companies sell to publishers among many other customers, so we think the capital in this half reaches the news business as a supplier relationship more than as a rescue. --- ## What publishers are building for themselves The other half of **UK media technology** looks different, and Ozone is its best-documented case. Ozone was founded in 2018 as a joint venture between News UK, Guardian Media Group, Telegraph Media Group and Reach. Its own account of 2025 says it responded to 23% more platform-scale briefs valued at six figures or more, with average order value up 8%, and that its Premium World product delivered £2.6m of incremental revenue to publishers across 56 campaigns for 34 multi-region advertisers. Headcount rose 26% across London, Manchester, New York and Chicago.[ ](https://ozoneproject.com/blog/ozone-matches-social-platforms-for-audience-reach-as-investment-grows/?ref=entrepreneurplus.co.uk) In April 2026 Ozone added a research arm. Ozone Labs will publish research on how publishers' content is sourced, valued and used within LLM ecosystems, run partner hackathons in the US and UK, and share prototypes openly, with over half of Ozone's workforce in product, engineering and data roles and its chief technology officer leading the experiments. Ozone is also extending its ad model to smaller specialist publishers through a Content Ignite partnership, since many of them lack the commercial, technical and ad-ops infrastructure to reach premium demand directly.[ ](https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/ozone-launches-ozone-labs-26415?ref=entrepreneurplus.co.uk) > *"Ozone Labs is our commitment to ensuring AI amplifies that human connection"* — ***Damon Reeve, CEO, Ozone, April 2026*** Ozone is one part of a wider pattern of publishers building shared infrastructure. SPUR was founded by the FT, Guardian, Telegraph, BBC and Sky News to develop shared standards for how AI companies use journalism, and is not a collective licensing body. It has since added more than 20 other publisher members. It aims to shape thinking on pay-per-crawl or pay-per-inference pricing, and its founders point to Microsoft's pilot AI content marketplace and a similar mechanism planned by Amazon. Collective licensing comes through a separate route. Publishers' Licensing Services is leading a content store, built by the Copyright Licensing Agency, that AI companies can access for a licence fee, and it is open to magazines, digital news and academic publishers. More than 250 UK publishers have opted in.[ ](https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/uk-news-giants-form-nato-for-news-group-to-defend-against-ai/?ref=entrepreneurplus.co.uk) > *"An ongoing and sustainable revenue stream for publishers that simply wasn't available before"* — ***Tom West, chief executive, Publishers' Licensing Services, March 2026*** Trust tools are appearing too, with Press Gazette and Flip-Pay built Made by Humans, which checks text, images, video and audio for AI generation from inside a publisher's content management system, after a survey of more than 200 publishers, editors and journalists found 95.3% wanted AI-generated content flagged to readers and 63.5% said their publication had no reliable way to check for unauthorised AI use. Nearly all of the digital publishing infrastructure in this half is owned by publishers or their trade bodies. --- ## Two UK startups, two outcomes Two UK-founded companies show how differently infrastructure for publishers can end up. Human Native was founded in 2024 to help content owners strike clearer licensing deals with AI firms. It was backed by LocalGlobe and Mercuri and its team included former staff from DeepMind, Google, Figma and Bloomberg. Cloudflare acquired it on 15 January 2026\. One customer, a prominent UK video AI company, threw away its existing training data after getting better results from data sourced through Human Native and now trains only on licensed content. Cloudflare did not disclose the price.[ ](https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/65bn-cloudflare-makes-swoop-for-london-based-ai-business/?ref=entrepreneurplus.co.uk) > *"An asset class that deserves structure, transparency and respect"* — **Will Allen and James Smith, Cloudflare blog announcing the acquisition, January 2026** Permutive shows another route, it is a London-registered data platform for publishers, and one aggregator lists its headcount at 108 as of June 2026\. The company says roughly six in ten enterprise media companies globally rely on its technology, and its last reported funding round was $75M in November 2021\. In July 2026 it announced an Adform partnership so publishers can activate first-party audiences across demand-side and supply-side platforms. It is still independent, and five years have passed since that reported round.[ ](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/permutive/%5F%5FQLZ-vAlAe732M7eZt90WhCONV9H3btpUcYoEIbB1G5k?ref=entrepreneurplus.co.uk) Zephr, the London paywall platform, sits between the two: it now operates as part of Zuora after a 2022 acquisition, the contrast complicates any tidy story. We think that difference may lie in what each company sells. Human Native's marketplace depended on AI companies paying for content, a market still being defined, while Permutive sells into publishers' advertising revenue, a market that already exists. For founders in **mediatech**, that is a hypothesis worth testing, not a finding. Neither outcome offers a template for **UK media technology** founders yet, since we cannot tell how many comparable companies never got as far as either.[ ](https://www.stateofdigitalpublishing.com/digital-platform-tools/best-paywall-services/?ref=entrepreneurplus.co.uk) --- ## Who owns the pipes The rules are being written underneath all of this. The technology secretary said on 18 March 2026 that the government no longer has a preferred option on copyright reform for AI. Its report favours a wait-and-see approach that allows industry-led licensing arrangements to develop. In June the CMA imposed a conduct requirement on Google that lets publishers opt out of their content powering AI features in search, and requires clearer attribution in AI-generated results. One industry source warns **Google's** confidential deals could make that ruling largely irrelevant if most publishers sign those rights away. For digital publishing, the practical question is whether the new opt-out gets used or traded. > *"The industry needs to base its model around access, and not copyright."* — **Madhav Chinnappa, former Google publisher-partnerships lead, Reuters Institute visiting fellow, August 2026** The funded half has its own ownership question, if ElevenLabs' parent is US-incorporated, the **UK media technology** success with the highest valuation has its legal home elsewhere, which sits awkwardly beside a national conversation about building British companies. We would not read too much into that yet, because a company can be London-rooted and US-incorporated at once. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/05/a4/05a4a052-18ab-4836-8924-ec8b322c371c/content/images/2026/09/mediatech.png.png) AI content studio ## The questions we can't yet answer We do not yet know whether the two halves will meet. Capital is going to content-creation tools, and the tools that distribute and monetise content are being built by the people who need them, so UK media technology has money in one place and urgency in the other. It is open whether a startup can build in the space between SPUR's standards and Google's private deals, or whether incumbents will fill it. We would like to know how much of the AI in media boom reaches publishers as revenue rather than as cost, and how many more UK-founded companies follow Human Native into larger groups, or Permutive into a long independent stretch. We also cannot say whether an opt-out that most publishers have signed away leaves anyone to use it, and what the **mediatech** sector looks like if they do. *This piece is based on secondary research. If you are someone who's building in UK media technology, we would really appreciate your opinions at *editorial@entrepreneurplus.co.uk** **Read more:** [*Meet Spaceflux, the Startup Behind the UK Space Squadron*](https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/meet-spaceflux-the-startup-behind-the-uk-space-squadron/) --- **Sources:* Press Gazette; Association of Online Publishers and DJB Strategies; Chartbeat via Axios; SmartFrame; Ozone; InPublishing; The Bookseller; GOV.UK (CMA); Computer Weekly; Cloudflare; CNBC; Business Cloud; State of Digital Publishing; Maddyness; Moore Kingston Smith; ElevenLabs; Turing Post; Companies House; Wikipedia; Tech Founders; Tracxn; Preqin; ZoomInfo; LeadIQ.*