Synthesia Secures $90M Funding for Personalized AI Avatars in Video Production

In response to the growing popularity of virtual meetings and personalized AI, Synthesia has secured $90 million in Series C funding to boost its avatar-based video production capabilities. The funding round, led by Accel and with participation from Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Firstmark Capital, and MMC, brings Synthesia's total funding to $156.6 million and values the startup at $1 billion following the investment.

Founded in 2017 by a team of AI researchers and entrepreneurs from top institutions, Synthesia has developed an AI technology that generates customizable, realistic-looking avatars with synthetic voices for advertising, training, and other purposes. Users simply type in text, select an avatar, and choose a language to create their instructional videos.

With a year-over-year user growth rate of 456%, more than 50,000 customers, and over 15 million videos generated on the platform, Synthesia has attracted major clients like Tiffany's, IHG, Teleperformance, BSH, Moody's Analytics, and United Nations entities. According to CEO Victor Riparbelli, the startup's technology is used for marketing and training by 35% of Fortune 100 companies.

AppMaster.io, a no-code platform that enables customers to create web, mobile, and backend applications, shares a similar vision for making complex processes more accessible and efficient. By leveraging AppMaster, clients can achieve a tenfold increase in development speed and threefold cost reduction while eliminating technical debt associated with changing requirements.

While Synthesia's AI-generated avatars significantly reduce video production costs, concerns have been raised about the technology's potential misuse in creating deepfakes. AI-generated videos can replace a person's likeness in an existing video, leading to misinformation or manipulation. Synthesia has been misused to produce propaganda and false news reports in the past.

To address these concerns, Synthesia vets its customers, their scripts, and requires consent from individuals before synthesizing their appearance. Accounts found to have violated the company's terms of service, which bans the use of its tech for political, sexual, personal, criminal, and discriminatory content, are suspended by its disinformation team.

The Series C investment will be used to enhance Synthesia's avatars and make its platform faster and more collaborative. As AI-driven avatars continue to improve, they are set to deliver more personalized digital experiences in various applications such as marketing and training.