This year, the Audi F1 Team will debut in Formula 1. Among the team’s key partners are two of Europe’s most highly valued tech scaleups — fintech Revolut and voice AI company ElevenLabs.
This marks a notable change in the type of brands now appearing on the F1 grid. It has traditionally been dominated by corporate heavyweights: Mastercard, Oracle, HP, and Atlassian — companies with annual revenues often run into the tens of billions of dollars. Against that backdrop, Revolut and ElevenLabs are significant by tech startup standards, but still modest compared to long-established institutional sponsors.
So why are venture-backed scaleups entering one of the most capital-intensive branding arenas in the world?
Sport sponsorship as a scale strategy
Both Revolut and ElevenLabs are relatively new to global sport sponsorship, but both are approaching it intensely. Over the past few years, Revolut has expanded its sports portfolio significantly, adding partnerships with football clubs Manchester City and Como 1907, rugby club Stade Toulousai alongside its Formula 1 title deal with Audi.
In an interview, Antoine Le Nel, Revolut’s Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, described sport as a natural competitive arena for fintech:
“We’re here in a competition against traditional banks in the same way we see sport teams competing,” he said. “We use the analogy of us being athletes and trying to compete in the world of banking.”
The analogy works precisely because banks have historically been among the most visible sponsors in Formula 1. By entering the same grid, Revolut is positioning itself alongside the giants it aims to challenge, with ambitions to become the primary bank for its customers, Le Nel explained.
Revolut moved quickly towards those ambitions. Following a late-2025 secondary share sale, its valuation exceeded $75 billion. Since launching in 2015, Revolut has grown to over 65 million customers worldwide; it now accounts for about one-third of all new digital banking accounts opened in Europe, as Alex Immerman, GP of a16z, noted publicly. Revenue is projected to hit $5.9 billion in 2025, while its business division alone has already surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue.
The company is targeting 100 million customers by mid-2027 and positioning itself as a leading B2B fintech player, backed by a planned $13 billion global investments push over five years. “And there’s no better platform than sport to put us on the map right now,” Le Nel says about the company’s sponsorship and expansion strategy.
To change people's habits and meet that goal the rules for sponsorship are also changing.
Revolut's Head of Partnerships Deborah Wajsbrot, told Vestbee that 2026 will “mark the end of partnerships as passive logo placement deals.” Instead, brands are expected to become embedded in the operations and experience of the entities they sponsor.
The Audi F1 deal reflects that approach. Revolut’s business platform will be integrated into the team’s financial infrastructure, powering payments and checkouts, including merch sales. Fans buying a jacket or cap will literally transact through Revolut. The company is also promising exclusive race-weekend experiences and perks for customers.
In practical terms, the F1 team becomes a live demonstration of what Revolut’s system can handle at scale and under pressure. The company believes sport has a critical part to play in helping it achieve its 100 million-customer goal.
If Revolut represents financial infrastructure, ElevenLabs represents narrative infrastructure
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is a relatively young and small company by Formula 1 stardarts. Yet it closed 2025 with over $330 million in ARR and recently raised $500 million Series D at a valuation exceeding $11 billion. Its voice AI products and tools already used by Time, Nvidia, Meta, Salesforce, Klarna, Revolut, and Boston Consulting Group.
Formula 1, however, is not simply a championship; it is a global content ecosystem. Multilingual broadcasts, commentary, interviews, sprint formats, and constant digital storytelling make it one of the most media-intensive sports events in the world. That ecosystem explains ElevenLabs’ move. The company partnered with Audi Revolut F1 Team to integrate audio and voice technology across the team's communications. The goal is to strengthen the connection between the team and its audience by improving how stories are told across languages and markets during a global race season.
As with Revolut, this partnership is less about logo visibility and more about capability. ElevenLabs’ AI-powered voice tools are designed to support how the team operates, communicates, and connects with fans worldwide — integrating the company’s technology directly into the storytelling infrastructure of a global sport.
“The pinnacle of motorsport blends technological excellence, teamwork, and elite competition,” said Mati Staniszewski, co-founder of ElevenLabs. “Together, we’re exploring how our technology can support the team while also transforming how fans around the world experience and connect with the sport.”
What a successful partnership would mean
For decades, Formula 1 has symbolized institutional power — luxury groups, legacy banks, and enterprise tech companies with the scale to dominate both their industries and the sponsorship landscape around them. Revolut and ElevenLabs may not match that scale, but they operate by different logic. As disruptors by design, they extend that mindset beyond their products into how they approach partnerships.
In this model, scaleups are not following the traditional sponsorship playbook — they are rewriting it. The key question is no longer “who should we partner with?” but “how do we activate this partnership for maximum relevance?”, as Deborah Wajsbrot puts it. Sponsorship shifts from logo exposure to product integration — embedded directly into the user journey.
This approach also reflects changing audience behaviour. As Wajsbrot notes, audiences now have more options beyond traditional competitions, from sprint formats to faster-paced sports models attracting younger communities. In response, brands are expected to operate more like content studios — co-creating entertainment, podcasts, docuseries, and interactive experiences alongside their partners.
Success, accordingly, is measured differently. The focus moves away from impressions toward product outcomes: user acquisition, feature adoption, retention. “Every partnership will be treated like a product launch,” Deborah Wajsbrot says — built around testing and clear performance thresholds. If it does not drive measurable growth, it does not justify the spend.
For scaleups, the objective is not awareness alone, but integration — turning attention into usage, and usage into loyalty.
