ElevenLabs Partners With Stan Lee Universe for AI Voices

ElevenLabs has inked a partnership with Stan Lee Universe, bringing the late Marvel co-creator’s AI-generated voice and likeness onto its platform. The deal places Stan Lee’s voice on the Iconic Marketplace for commercial licensing, introduces a Stan Lee Book of the Month Club within the Eleven Reader app, and adds his likeness to Creative Templates. It marks the latest instance of a deceased cultural icon being digitally resurrected through artificial intelligence.

The synthetic voice was built from professional recordings of Lee, who passed away on November 12, 2018, at age 95. Stan Lee Universe, the joint venture between Genius Brands International and POW! Entertainment, controls Lee’s name, voice, likeness, and post-Marvel intellectual property.

A book club narrated by a voice from beyond

The partnership’s centerpiece is the Stan Lee Book of the Month Club, launching inside the Eleven Reader app. Each month, ElevenLabs will release a public domain classic narrated in Lee’s AI-generated voice, beginning with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in June. The company plans to add one title per month for the next 12 months.

Choosing public domain works is a practical move. It sidesteps the licensing complications of narrating copyrighted books with a synthetic voice while giving ElevenLabs a recurring content program tied to a recognizable name. Users can also select Lee’s voice to narrate any book in the Eleven Reader library, extending the partnership well beyond the curated monthly selections.

Cameos, reimagined through AI

Lee’s likeness is coming to ElevenLabs Creative Templates, the company’s visual content generator. Users will be able to create images and videos featuring Lee, echoing the on-screen cameos that became his signature across decades of Marvel films. All personal use remains non-commercial and is governed by safety guidelines approved by both parties. Licensed commercial use of Lee’s likeness is available through the Stan Lee Universe team.

Two music Finetunes, Superhero Swells and Retro Hero Fanfare, round out the offering. These are music filters on ElevenCreative Music designed to evoke the aesthetic of Lee’s universe. They are available to all ElevenLabs users with no additional licensing required.

A consent-based licensing framework

The deal follows the consent-based licensing model ElevenLabs established when it launched its Iconic Marketplace in November 2025. That marketplace connects brands with rights holders for verified celebrity voices, including Michael Caine, Matthew McConaughey, Judy Garland, Burt Reynolds, John Wayne, and Liza Minnelli. ElevenLabs acts as an intermediary, handling licensing agreements and voice synthesis while ensuring that estates and rights holders retain control.

That framework matters because the alternative is already widespread. AI-generated songs have appeared on deceased artists’ streaming pages without estate or label approval, and unauthorized voice clones of public figures circulate freely. ElevenLabs is positioning its marketplace as the legitimate alternative, a model where rights holders initiate and control the licensing rather than discovering their assets have been cloned without permission.

Chaz Rainey of Stan Lee Universe framed the partnership as a continuation of how Lee engaged with fans throughout his career. Lee was known for meeting audiences wherever they were, whether in comic book pages, at conventions, or in his trademark movie cameos. The AI voice and likeness tools are pitched as the next iteration of that tradition.

An $11 billion bet on voice

ElevenLabs raised $500 million in a Series D round in February 2026, led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $11 billion. That was more than triple its previous valuation from a $6.6 billion employee tender offer in September 2025. The company closed 2025 at $330 million in annual recurring revenue and has raised $811 million in total funding.

The Stan Lee partnership is the latest in a series of high-profile deals that position ElevenLabs as the dominant platform for AI-powered digital afterlives. The Iconic Marketplace already hosts voices ranging from living celebrities like McConaughey and Caine to historical figures including Maya Angelou, Alan Turing, and Mark Twain. The company’s roster spans actors, athletes, scientists, and cultural icons.

Stan Lee Universe has been active in licensing Lee’s legacy since its formation in 2020. In May 2022, it signed a 20-year deal with Marvel Studios granting exclusive rights to use Lee’s name, voice, likeness, and signature in future films, television productions, and Disney theme parks worldwide. The ElevenLabs deal extends that licensing strategy into AI-generated content, a category that did not meaningfully exist when the Marvel deal was signed.

The uncomfortable question

The partnership will inevitably invite scrutiny. The ethics of AI-generated content remain contested, and putting a dead man’s voice and face into new creative contexts, no matter how carefully licensed, raises questions that consent frameworks alone cannot fully answer. Lee cannot approve what his AI likeness says or does. The rights holders can, and in this case they have, but the distance between estate approval and personal consent is a gap the industry has not resolved.

What ElevenLabs and Stan Lee Universe have built is the most commercially structured version of digital resurrection yet attempted for a pop culture figure of this stature. Whether that structure is sufficient to honor the legacy it claims to protect is a question that will follow every AI-generated cameo, every synthetic narration, and every licensed use of a voice whose owner is no longer here to hear it.