Synthesia secures £37.7 million Series B investment led by Kleiner Perkins

AI Video Platform Synthesia Raises $50M From Kleiner Perkins And GV, The Biggest Round To Date in Synthetic Media

  •  Synthesia, the exponentially growing AI video platform, secures $50 million in Series B funding, making it the largest investment in the synthetic media space to date.
  • The round is led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and previous investors Firstmark Capital, LDV Capital, Seedcamp and MMC Ventures.
  • The funding will be used to further accelerate their rapid growth and invest in advancing the foundational technology for generating digital humans.
  • The round also includes an A-list of angel investors, with Patrick and John Collison (Stripe), Anne Raimondi (Asana), Des Traynor (InterCom), Soleio Cuervo (Facebook/Dropbox), Christian Reber (Pitch, Wunderlist), Andrey Khusid (Miro) among many more.

LONDON (December 8, 2021): Adoption of AI generated video is skyrocketing in the enterprise. In the last year alone, Synthesia generated more than 6 million unique videos for thousands of clients, ranging from global corporations to small businesses.Clients include EY, who use Synthesia for client communications, and WPP, who use Synthesia for personalised training for 50,000 employees. Synthesia also powers celebrity campaigns such as PepsiCo’s Messi Messages and Malaria No More with David Beckham.

Synthesia, the AI video company that operates the world’s largest AI video platform, today announces a $50M Series B financing round led by Josh Coyne from Kleiner Perkins with participation from GV and all existing investors. The round is the largest investment to date in the synthetic media space.

“Today, consumers expect video and audio content. And they take that preference with them to work. We’re seeing this drive rapid demand for scaleable content creation solutions in the enterprise,” explains Victor Riparbelli, Co-Founder and CEO of Synthesia.

Traditional methods of producing video and audio are expensive, cumbersome and require specialists. It is impossible to keep the content library up to date as the business changes. The effort required, compared to making a slide or writing text, is enormous. Synthesia closes that gap.

“With Synthesia, anyone in the enterprise can generate video directly from their browser. No need for cameras, studios or actors. You simply select an avatar, type the script, hit generate and the video is ready in a few minutes. For our thousands of customers it is transformational to enable anyone in the company to produce uniform, on-brand video content for everything from internal training to personalized sales prospecting,” Riparbelli added.

One of the most popular features of Synthesia is the ability to create your own AI avatar by submitting roughly 5 minutes of video content. More than 35 partners at EY now have their own avatars that they use for both internal communication and as a part of the sales process.

“We’re already hosting thousands of custom avatars and are seeing this number rapidly increasing. Just like most of us are now accustomed to being on live video calls, we’re certain that in the next 5 years we’ll see AI avatars become more commonplace in business communications,” said Riparbelli.

“Some of the most iconic software companies in history were able to take advanced functionality and make it accessible and easy-to-use for any knowledge worker,” said Josh Coyne, partner, Kleiner Perkins. “Synthesia is doing just that while pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI-generated video. We’re excited to partner with them on this journey.”

With the new funding, Synthesia will focus on accelerating commercialisation while also investing heavily in the long-term research required to fully realize their vision of synthetic media over the next decade.

“In the short term we’re focused on building out functionality to help our customers create and distribute content at lighting speed, either via our web app or API. We’re also soon launching the next generation of our video technology that will increase the realism of the videos and enable emotion and body language control,” Riparbelli explains.

“Ultimately, we’re an AI company. Looking into the next decade of Synthesia, we’re building for a future where you can create Hollywood-grade video on a laptop. On our way there we’ll be solving some of the hardest and most fundamental problems in AI and computer vision.”

“With the new funds we’ll invest even deeper in advancing our core AI research to accelerate this vision. In parallel we will also slowly open up some of our research to the world and begin actively contributing to the broader research community,” Riparbelli adds.

The company is now building a London-based studio to capture detailed 3D human data at scale. This will be the first step towards expanding from the front-facing video content its platform can generate today, to building a platform that eventually will enable the creation of full scenes and movies.

“We’re incredibly early in synthetic media. Our core thesis is that eventually it will be a fundamental web technology that will alter the online experience in a profound way like we’ve seen with Flash, JavaScript, WebGL and WebRTC and the list goes on. The capability to generate hyperreal media content entirely via software will be a catalyst for an entirely new UI and UX that we can’t really imagine yet. This is the long term market opportunity we’re capturing.”

“Recently the word metaverse has been popularized and I think that can be one expression of the above, although we believe it will go much deeper,” he added.

Synthesia was founded in 2017 by entrepreneurs Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild and world-renowned computer vision professors Lourdes Agapito and Matthias Niessner. Back then, it wasn’t clear at all whether synthetic media would take off.

“In 2017, most only saw the potential downsides of AI video. The now popularized term ‘deepfake’ comes mostly with negative connotations. In the last couple of years we, and other great companies, have proven just how beneficial this technology is in both consumer and enterprise applications.”

While Synthesia recognises the potential risks of AI video, they are committed to the ethical implementation of synthetic media. The company doesn’t synthesize anyone without explicit consent and

the technology is only accessible via an on-rails experience that is fully controlled by Synthesia.

“Synthesia was built on an ethical framework that we formulated and published at the inception of the company. We also work with key institutions, such as Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative, to ensure that synthetic media is deployed ethically. This is an industry effort,” Riparbelli added.

About Synthesia

Founded in 2017 by technology entrepreneurs Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild and world-renowned professors of computer vision Matthias Niessner and Lourdes Agapito, Synthesia is focused on reducing the friction of video creation and making it possible for anyone to create professional-looking videos in minutes, directly from their browser.

Synthesia’s first commercial product, Synthesia STUDIO launched in public beta in the summer of 2020. It is now used by thousands of companies, including several Fortune 500 companies. Previously, Synthesia’s technology has enabled award-winning AI media campaigns such as Malaria no more with David Beckham, Lionel Messi Lays campaign and JustEat ads with Snoop Dogg.

Synthesia has 60 employees with offices in London, New York, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Munich and Ljubljana.

Synthesia is funded by Kleiner Perkins, GV, FirstMark Capital, LDV Capital, MMC Ventures, Seedcamp, Mark Cuban, Taavet Hinrikus, Martin Varsavsky, TinyVC, Christian Bach, Michael Buckley, Patrick and John Collison, Des Traynor, Soleio Cuervo, Christian Reber, Anne Raimondi, Chris Zak, Nathan Benaich, Guy Podjarny and Mike Murchison.

For any press inquiries, please contact Daniel Verten via [email protected] or +447818194840. For more information on Synthesia and its products, please visit https://www.synthesia.io/. You can follow us on twitter: @synthesiaio

ENDS

Safiya Marzook

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