Synthesia, an AI video creation platform used by over 50,000 businesses, just raised $90 million during a Series C funding round led by Accel. The round also included participation from NVIDIA and existing backers Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Firstmark Capital, bringing Synthesia’s total funding to over $119 million.
The fresh capital will fuel the company’s vision of making video easy for everyone through advancements in AI and collaboration tools. The firm’s CEO and co-founder, Victor Riparbelli, emphasized that the funding will “accelerate us towards our vision at an even faster pace.”
Founded in 2016, Synthesia has seen significant growth and adoption of its AI avatars and video editing platform by businesses. A third of Fortune 100 companies now reportedly use Synthesia to create AI-powered explainer, training, and marketing videos.
Even though the firm is reluctant to make public its revenue figures, Riparbelli told the tech-focused magazine TechCrunch that the firm has managed to grow its user base by 456% in the past year and that more than 15 million videos have been generated by using its platform.
Here’s How Synthesia Plans to Use the Funding
Riparbelli said that seeing “thousands of our users, of all skill levels, creating and collaborating on video content with Synthesia is truly magical”. The highly competitive Series C round demonstrates investor interest in AI tools that can improve the laborious and time-consuming process of creating and editing videos.
Synthesia now aims to leverage its fresh capital and AI expertise to advance the state of avatar and video editing technology for businesses. If successful, the company’s ambition of ‘making video easy for everyone’ will become one step closer to reality.
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These are four areas of the business that Synthesia will be improving by using the funding it just got:
AI Research: Synthesia plans to develop “next-generation” avatar technology with more expressions, natural movements, voices, and customization options. The company is already working on research that will allow its avatars to perform more complex tasks besides simply speaking to the camera.
Platform Development: Synthesia will pursue product enhancements to make the platform faster, more collaborative, and even more powerful. New features under consideration include real-time collaboration, improved sharing and invites, mobile editing, audit logs, two avatars on screen simultaneously, and enhanced video editing tools.
Performance and UX: The company aims to improve app performance, reduce “annoyances” from rapidly shipping new features, and optimize the overall user experience. As Synthesia’s video editing platform becomes more sophisticated, ironing out these issues will remain a priority.
Hiring AI and Engineering Talent: In order to achieve its roadmap and research goals, Synthesia plans to significantly scale up its AI and engineering teams over the next 12-18 months. This hiring growth will be enabled by the new funding.
AI Video Generation Market Could be Worth Over $1bn in 2027
According to data from Markets and Markets, the market for AI video generators is growing rapidly and it is forecasted to reach a value of $1.08 billion by the end of 2027, expanding at a compounded annual growth rate of approximately 17.5%.
The increased adoption of video content platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is fueling this growing interest in AI-powered video generation tools. Companies can tap on solutions like the one developed by Synthesia to develop content quickly and inexpensively for multiple areas of the business.
Music and comedy videos are the two most popular content categories that video creators tend to focus and these two are watched by more than a third of all global interest users, M&M research reports.
However, educational videos are also becoming more and more frequently sought by internet users and platforms like Synthesia could be used by course creators, institutions, and e-learning platforms to facilitate the process of creating these films.
Other companies that directly compete with Synthesia include Lumen5, Rephrase.ai, Raw Shorts, and Runway. The latter recently received a $100 million investment from Google (GOOG) to further develop its AI models for video generation.