As the world goes on. go through How to do it? Handle With the explosion of deep fake content online, all AI-generated videos seem to be stirring up controversy. SynthesiaA London startup whose 60,000 – 1 million users are tapping the technology to create image-based videos from text documents to create image-based videos for sales and marketing – says a London startup's product, an innovation around realistic AI avatar technology. training and more.
Now VCs also want in on the action. Synthesia confirmed today that it has closed $180 million in Series D funding, raising the company's valuation to $2.1 billion. NEA has a new investor, WiL (World Innovation Lab); NEA is led by Atlassian Ventures and PSP Growth, with participation from previous backers GV and MMC Ventures. Synthesia has raised $330 million to date.
The startup plans to use the funding for hiring, especially since most of Synthesia's operations are in Europe and North America today to expand in the Asia Pacific region and continue to evolve its products.
“We're doubling down on everything we're doing,” CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli said in an interview. “We want to make our statues better.” The company's “long road map” includes more practical moves. Ability to port avatars to different environments; For example physical demonstrations that can interact with objects; and avatars that interact with users. By building “agents” to make it easier for customers to create avatar-based content, it's going to eat some dogfood of its own.
One movement that can't be followed is in M&A. Synthesia hasn't been acquired to date, and Riparbelli says its priority is to build its technology in-house, along with using APIs it doesn't build itself. For example, It works with Eleven Labs for audio, and instead of building its own, it taps and tunes a variety of large-scale third-party language models.
Synthesia's rotation has been going on for at least a few months: The Information reported. It reportedly raised $150 million by November 2024. It's been about 18 months since Synthesia last disclosed funding for a few more fundraising scenarios: June 2023; Closed a $90 million round valued at $1 billion. With previous backers including Kleiner Perkins and Accel.
In the interim, AI companies are a huge magnet for VCs. Bright spot In a somewhat underfunded landscape, AI accounted for more than 37% of the $368.5 billion invested in all startups worldwide by 2024, according to PitchBook data. In the US, the ratio is even more stark, where AI startups raised nearly 50% of the $209 billion invested last year.
Synthesia now has 60,000 businesses as customers, compared to 50,000 by June 2023, and its aim is to carve out its own niche in the space for businesses looking to build their video interactions.
It's doing so as advanced AI video functionality becomes more and more common. There are startups working on additional scalability. Full product video Although basic documents are not available, some are intended to be built. Real-time interactive avatars versus Real-time video assistants. Some claim to be able to create animated images from their users. Only one minute of video. (A simple test to see how crowded the market is here is to Google Synthesia and see how many companies are buying search ads against its name. There are a lot.)
Synthesia is not immune to product race. It has been building the “2.0” version of its platform for some time and has already released several related features, including its own functionality. Personal avatars Users can do the feature with a laptop camera or phone. Emotions; a Chrome extension Creates basic videos based on screen data. Its own version AI video assistant Convert documents to video; Multiple language options; Collaborative features for people to edit a video simultaneously.
However, Riparbelli believes the company has an edge with its heavy focus on enterprise users, which its investors say makes the startup attractive.
“Synthesia is one of only a handful of AI companies that can take the cutting edge of AI and translate it into something truly useful,” Vidu Shanmugarajah, a partner at Google Ventures in London, said in an interview. “He has an extreme customer focus. They are obsessed with driving value in a practical situation. Integrating that into a secure and flexible platform is very difficult.”
It's also interesting to see Atlassian investing in this round. The company has added AI functionality to its various apps, and it's only a matter of time before a platform like Jira adds more video tools to the mix. Door to join its portfolio company.