Synthesia secures $180M at $2.1B valuation for its B2B AI video platform
And the world continues to do so Work through how handle As deepfake content spreads across the internet, it seems that not all AI-generated videos are controversial. Synthesisa London startup that builds products based on hyper-realistic, AI-powered avatar technology, says it has been a big hit with enterprises, with about 60,000 of them – 1 million users – exploiting the technology to create avatar-based videos from text documents, For sales, marketing, training and more.
Now venture capitalists also want to get in on the action. Synthesia today confirmed that it has closed a $180 million financing round, a Series D that raised the company’s valuation to $2.1 billion. NEA is leading the round, with participation from new investors WiL (Global Innovation Lab), Atlassian Ventures, and PSP Growth, as well as previous backers GV and MMC Ventures. Synthesia has raised $330 million to date.
The startup plans to use the funding to hire, especially to expand into the Asia-Pacific region – the bulk of Synthesia’s business today is in Europe and North America – and to further develop its products.
“We’re doubling down on all the things we already do right,” Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. “We want to make our avatars better.” He said the company’s “long road map” includes more realistic movement; the ability to move avatars to different environments; avatars that can interact with objects, for example, to provide physical demonstrations; And avatars that can interact with users. It will also eat some of its own experimental fare by building more “agents” to help customers create avatar-based content more easily.
One area where you are not chasing activity is mergers and acquisitions. Synthesia has not yet made any acquisitions, and Riparbelli said it prefers to build its own technology internally, along with using application programming interfaces (APIs) for what it doesn’t build itself. For example, it works with Eleven Labs for audio, tapping into and fine-tuning a variety of large third-party language models rather than creating its own.
The Synthesia tour has been in the works for at least a few months: info I mentioned It was raising $150 million in November 2024. For more context on the fundraising, it has been about 18 months since Synthesia last disclosed funding: in June 2023, Closed $90M round at $1B valuation With previous backers including Kleiner Perkins and Axel.
Meanwhile, AI companies have been a big magnet for venture capital, providing… Bright spot In a somewhat lackluster financing landscape. AI startups accounted for more than 37% of the $368.5 billion invested in all startups in 2024 globally, according to PitchBook data. In the United States, the percentage was clearer, as artificial intelligence startups received nearly 50% of the $209 billion invested last year.
And yes, issues abound in the field of artificial intelligence. The energy consumption required to train and run AI models, major copyright issues around how models are trained, AI being weaponised such as in the case of deepfakes or malicious hacking, AI replacing humans and their work, AI getting things wrong – all huge problems that Our confrontation has not yet been resolved meaningfully. But there are also some important proponents who will push the AI industry to greater and more visible levels. Synthesia was one of the companies name-checked by the UK government this week when it launched its programme Big AI business planwith the aim of distributing billions of deals to artificial intelligence companies to rebuild public services and the economy.
Synthesia says it now has 60,000 businesses as customers, compared to 50,000 in June 2023, and its goal was to create its own niche in the space as the platform of choice for enterprises looking to build their own video interactions.
It does so at a time when advanced AI video functionality is becoming increasingly more popular. There are startups working on the ability to extrapolate Full product videos Of basic documents, while others are intended for construction Avatars are capable of real-time interactions and Real-time video assistants. Some claim that they are able to create lifelike avatars for their users Only one minute of video. (A simple test to see how crowded the market is here is to put Synthesia into Google, and check how many companies buy search ads for its name. There are a lot.)
Synthesia is not immune to product race. The “2.0” version of its platform has been in the works for a while and has already released a number of related features, including its own Personal avatars Which users can make using their laptop or phone camera Emotions; A Chrome extension which creates basic videos based on screen data; Its own version of Artificial intelligence video assistant It can convert documents into videos; Multilingual options; And collaboration features for people to edit a video at a time.
More importantly, Riparbelli believes the company has an advantage by focusing itself squarely on business users, and its investors say that is what makes the startup attractive.
“Synthesia is one of the few AI companies that can take the latest AI technology and actually translate it into something of real utility,” Vidhu Shanmugarajah, a partner at Google Ventures in London, said in an interview. “It’s very customer-focused. They’re obsessed with the value of driving in a practical environment. Putting that together in a secure, compliant platform is very difficult.”
It’s also interesting to see Atlassian investing in this round. The company has been introducing AI functionality into its various applications, and it seems like it’s only a matter of time that a platform like Jira will start adding more video tools into the mix, opening the door to even more video tools. Door to cooperation with its portfolio company.
