Synthesia Successfully Integrates AI in Video Content Creation

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Through a recent funding round, London-based Synthesia recently became the UK’s most valuable Gen-AI media company. The company continues to grow rapidly within the video-content creation space.

Synthesia’s Offerings

Synthesia was founded in 2017 by Steffen Tjerrild, Lourdes Agapito, Matthias Niessner, and Victor Riparbelli, who were all AI researchers and entrepreneurs from UCL, Stanford, TUM, and Cambridge.

The founders wanted to create a solution that would let even a “16-year-old sitting in their bedroom with a good idea to make a Hollywood film.” Initially, the company focused on building an AI dubbing tool. But within three years, they realized that while the technology to synchronize mouth movements to various languages helped generate revenue, it was turning them into nothing more than a service-based visual effects company. They wanted to be more impactful in the longer run and decided to pivot into creating a solution that would empower people with limited resources to make videos.

As part of building such a solution, Synthesia’s founders identified that amateur video content creators were willing to pay for a lower quality video output if the option was more affordable and easier to use.

Since being founded, Synthesia also diversified into providing video content creating abilities for organizations. Today, its AI-driven tools allow businesses to produce high-quality, scalable video content. It boasts of a customer base of over 60,000 customers, which includes over 60% of Fortune 100 companies. These bigger organizations are using its platform for internal communications, training, and external engagement.

Synthesia 2.0 offers features such as Personal Avatars that are custom AI avatars with a natural background that speak over 30 languages. These can be created in minutes with a phone or laptop camera. It also offers a Chrome extension called the AI Screen Recorder that records a computer’s screen and creates professional videos in minutes, an AI Video Assistant that converts documents or web pages into videos, a multilingual video player that supports playback for multiple translations of a single video, a video localization solution that includes a single click translation for videos created in Synthesia, and a live collaboration tool that allows multiple people to work together on a video at the same time in real-time.

The company expects these features to help organizations and individuals create and distribute highly customized video content at scale. One of the use cases that Synthesia’s founders talk about is that while the BBC will always likely have a human newsreader fronting the Six O’Clock News, it could reach new audiences by creating multilingual avatars to read out cricket results for audiences in India.

Synthesia’s Financials

Synthesia has seen strong revenue growth in the recent past. It tripled its revenues in 2023 to ￡25.7 million (~$33 million) from ￡8.6 million (~$10.9 million) in 2022. Over the same period, losses grew from ￡4.5 million (~$5.7 million) to ￡23.5 million (~$29.9 million). The company now employs more than 400 people across offices in London, New York, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Zurich, and Munich.

Synthesia is still privately held and has raised over $330 million from investors including GV, MMC Ventures, FirstMark, WiL (World Innovation Lab), Atlassian Ventures, and PSP Growth. Its last round of funding was held in January this year when it raised $180 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. The round was led by NEA with participation from existing investors. An earlier round held in 2023 had valued the company at $1 billion. It plans to use the latest funds to continue to invest in product development and to enhance its security and compliance.

AI is a highly crowded market. Synthesia’s competitors include niche players such as Veed.io and Runway along with tech giants like OpenAI and Adobe who also have their own offerings of generative AI tools for video creation. Synthesia will need to remain quick on its toes to stay ahead of the competition.

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