As OpenAI, Google and Adobe vie with startups like Runway to make Hollywood-ready AI video tools, one British startup is taking a very different tack. It wants to help corporates make training videos that people will actually watch.
That’s a dull but lucrative niche for Synthesia which just raised $180 million in a round led by NEA which valued the London-based startup at over $2.1 billion. Chemicals giant DuPont, printer-maker Xerox and airline Spirit are now using Synthesia’s 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, Synthesia’s CEO and co-founder. “You can think of it like 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 revenues from $31.3 million in 2023, according to its corporate filings. With its $180 million funding and the backing of new investors Atlassian Ventures and billionaire Penny Pritzker’s fund, PSP Growth, Synthesia plans to invest in making its avatars more lifelike, and tools to make creating and hosting videos easier.
Riparbelli says that some of his clients are already using Synthesia avatars to front marketing videos, and some Tiktok creators are using them to produce videos, but the technology isn’t ready yet to push into advertising, or content production. “We have some big models training right now that I think will probably begin to get us over that threshold within the next like, three to six months,” he says.
That could push Synthesia into competition with AI giants like OpenAI and its Sora video generator and startup Runway. “We don’t care about AI video as in ‘here’s a thing that can make absolutely anything you can think of,'” says Riparbelli, a 30 Under 30 alum. “We only care about humans and videos and presenters for business content.”
Riparbelli thinks that Synthesia’s narrower focus on just human proxies as opposed to modelling spaceships, dragons and other fantastical creations, will keep it in the game against rivals with more firepower. And his customers are more likely to be stretched HR teams rather than Hollywood directors, or special effects hotshots. “I don’t see the competition on a model level…and any of these companies are not dipping their toes in our space yet,” he says.
Synthesia says it has also taken a cautious approach on content moderation running checks on scripts and videos being produced on its platform. Only corporate clients are allowed to produce news-focused or political content, that comes after the New York Times reported Synthesia avatars were used to pump out videos for a pro-China disinformation campaign. The risks could increase as Synthesia begins to roll out generic avatars that aren’t trained off a specific human presenter. “The more powerful AI models gets the more important that content moderation gets,” he Riparbelli.
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