Artificial intelligence video startup Synthesia Ltd. has reportedly raised $200 million in new funding at a $4 billion valuation.
Though the company has not confirmed the new raise, Forbes reported today that GV Management Co., the former Google Ventures owned by Alphabet Inc., led the round.
Founded in 2017 by a team of researchers and entrepreneurs from institutions such as University College London, Stanford and Cambridge, Synthesia offers a platform where users can turn text into videos through a combination of generative AI with lifelike avatars that can speak and present in multiple languages. The idea is that instead of filming a person in a studio, a user can choose an avatar, plug in a script and select a language if needed and the system produces the video.
The company focuses primarily on enterprise use cases such as internal communications, employee training, sales enablement, product demos, customer support and marketing. Synthesia’s large corporate clients use the service to create multilingual videos at scale, something that would be prohibitively expensive with traditional video production methods.
Along with a lineup of default avatars, Synthesia also allows brands to create custom avatars tailored to their identity. The system supports voice-over, lip-sync and facial motion and can operate across many languages and dialects.
As the technology could be used to create deepfakes or misinformation, Synthesia also has policies in place for consent, moderation and misuse prevention.
The reported round comes a week after it was reported that Synthesia was reported to have rejected a $3 billion takeover offer by Adobe Inc. The Times reported Oct. 23 that the company held talks with Adobe earlier this year but chose to remain independent. Notably, the report also claims that Synthesia had held potential acquisition talks with Meta Platforms Inc. earlier this year, but the talks did not progress.
The new funding, if confirmed, would take the total amount raised by Synthesia to approximately $536 million, based on data from Tracxn. Previous rounds raised by the company include $90 million raised in June 2023 and $180 million on a $2.1 billion valuation in January.
Previous investors in Synthesia include New Enterprise Associates Inc., World Innovation Lab Inc., Atlassian Corp., PSP Partners, GV, MMC Ventures LLP, FirstMark, Accel Partners LP, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Adobe.
Image: Synthesia
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