Synthesia co-founder Victor Riparbelli just raised $180 million in a $2.1 billion round to bring AI-generated video avatars to life.
Synthesis
As OpenAI, Google and Adobe battle startups like Runway to make Hollywood-ready video tools, one British startup is taking a very different route. He wants to help corporations make training videos that people will actually watch.
It’s a boring but profitable place for Synthesia, which just raised $180 million in a round led by NEA, which valued the London-based startup at over $2.1 billion. Chemical giant DuPont, printer maker Xerox and airline Spirit are now using Synthesia avatars to deliver safety briefings and other training videos in over 20 languages with just one click.
“People are taking text and slide content and turning it into video now,” says Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia. “You can think of it as Powerpoint 2.0 with the same type of user and use case,”
Synthesia was reported to have generated more than $70 million in revenue last year, more than doubling its revenue to $31.3 million in 2023, according to its corporate filings. With its $180 million in funding and backing from new investors Atlassian Ventures and billionaire Penny Pritzker’s PSP Growth fund, Synthesia plans to invest in making its avatars more alive and tools to make creation easier and video hosting.
Riparbelli says some of his customers are already using Synthesia’s avatars to watch marketing videos, and some Tiktok creators are using them to produce videos, but the technology isn’t yet ready to drive advertising or content production. “We’ve got some great models training right now that I think will probably start to break that threshold for us within the next three to six months,” he says.
That could push Synthesia into competition with AI giants like OpenAI and its video generator Sora and startup Runway. “We don’t care about AI video, because ‘here’s a thing that can do absolutely anything you can think of,'” says Riparbelli, a 30 Under 30 alum. “We only care about people and video and presenters for business content .”
Riparbelli thinks Synthesia’s narrower focus on just human proxies as opposed to modeling spaceships, dragons and other fantastical creations will keep it in the game against rivals with more firepower. And his clients are more likely to be HR teams than Hollywood directors, or special effects shots. “I don’t see competition at the model level…and none of these companies are dipping their toes into our space yet,” he says.
Synthesia says it has also taken a careful approach to content moderation controls on scripts and videos produced on its platform. Only corporate clients are allowed to produce content focused on news or politics, which follows New York Times Synthesia avatars were reportedly used to release videos for a pro-China disinformation campaign. The risks may increase as Synthesia begins to spawn generic avatars that are not trained by a specific human host. “The more powerful AI models become, the more important content moderation becomes,” Riparbelli.
