AI Video Platform Synthesia Raises $90M Series C with Investment from Nvidia
Producing quality content for professional videos can be time-consuming and expensive, but advances in AI technology are giving enterprises more options. One company making waves in this space is Synthesia, an AI video generation platform that has just raised $90 million in Series C funding with investment from Nvidia.
Synthesia enables enterprises to create instructional videos featuring stock or custom AI avatars. The stock avatars are made using a sophisticated process that begins with a real-life actor being filmed in a professional studio. The actor is captured reciting a script, and this footage is used to create a digital twin of the actor – the AI avatar. For custom AI avatars, users can request to use their own likeness in a similar process. Both stock and custom avatars can speak in over 60 different languages and accents to be used in training videos, how-to guides, or other business-related video content.
“We’ve made great strides toward our vision to make video easy for everyone, but there’s still a long way to go. I’m proud of our team for building Synthesia into a sustainable company that delivers real business utility, not just novelty, for our thousands of customers,” said Synthesia Co-founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli.
The Synthesia platform boasts a YoY growth rate of 456% with over 12 million videos generated to date. The company claims to serve more than 50,000 businesses worldwide, and that its clients have reported saving up to 95% in production time, amounting to thousands in reduced costs. Synthesia counts Tiffany’s, IHG, Moody’s Analytics, and entities of the United Nations as customers.
An example of one of the stock AI avatars available on the Synthesia platform. (Source: Synthesia)
This latest funding round was led by Accel with investment from NVentures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm, and participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins, GV, Firstmark Capital, Alex Wang, Olivier Pomel, and Amjad Masad.
Riparbelli said in a statement that the company was not actively seeking new investment, but that Accel and Nvidia share its vision for transforming traditional video production into a digital workflow that can help creators bring ideas to life.
“From our first meeting, Synthesia stood out as one of the few generative AI companies combining a differentiated technology, an exceptional founding team, and a very strong ROI for its enterprise customers,” said Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel. “By dramatically lowering the cost and production time of videos, Synthesia is opening a new range of use cases for corporate training, marketing, and communication videos.”
Synthesia says its new capital will go toward accelerating AI research, an area the company has focused on while building its core technology in-house since its founding in 2017. The R&D team collaborates with TUM (Technical University of Munich) and UCL (University College London) and is behind several AI breakthroughs, according to a statement.
In a blog post, Riparbelli wrote that the company is working on the next generation of avatar technology that will give the avatars more expressions, more natural movements, better voices, and more customization options.
