Synthesia raises $180M at $2.1B valuation for B2B AI video platform

As the world continues to work on how to deal with the explosion of deepfake content online, it seems that not all AI-generated videos are creating controversy. Synthesia, a London-based start-up building highly realistic AI avatar technology, says it’s been a huge success with the company, with around 60,000 people – 1 million users – tapping the technology to create avatar-based videos from text documents, for sales and marketing, for training and others. Now VCs also want in on the action. Synthesia today confirmed it has closed a $180 million Series D funding round that catapults the company’s valuation to $2.1 billion. NEA led the round, with participation from new investors WiL (World Innovation Lab), Atlassian Ventures, and PSP Growth, plus previous backers GV and MMC Ventures. Synthesia has raised $330 million to date. The startup plans to use the funding to hire, primarily to expand in Asia Pacific — much of Synthesia’s current business is in Europe and North America — and to continue developing its product. “We’re doubling down on all the things we’ve done right,” CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli said in an interview. “We want to make our avatars better.” He said the company’s “long roadmap” includes more realistic movements; can port avatars to different environments; avatars that can interact with objects to, for example, provide physical demonstrations; and an avatar that the user can interact with. It will also eat some of its own dogfood by building more “agents” to help customers create avatar-based content more easily. One area where it is not pursuing activity is in M&A. Synthesia has so far not made any acquisitions and Riparbelli says his choice is to build the technology in-house, as well as use APIs for what he doesn’t build himself. For example, it works with Eleven Labs for sound, and taps and adjusts various third-party Large Language Models instead of creating your own. Synthesia’s round has been in the works for at least a few months: The Information reports that it raised $150 million in November 2024. For a smaller fundraising context, it’s been about 18 months since Synthesia announced its last funding: in June 2023, it closed a round of $90 million at a valuation of $1 billion with previous backers including Kleiner Perkins and Accel. Meanwhile, AI companies have become a huge magnet for VCs, providing a bright spot in a rather sparse funding landscape. AI startups account for more than 37% of the $368.5 billion invested in all startups in 2024 globally, according to PitchBook data. In the US, the proportion is even more pronounced, with AI startups getting almost 50% of the $209 billion invested last year. Synthesia says it currently has 60,000 businesses as customers, compared to 50,000 in June 2023, and its goal is to carve its own niche in the space as a platform for companies looking to create video interactions. This is done as more advanced AI video functions become commonplace. There are startups working on the ability to extrapolate full product videos from basic documents, while others aim to build real-time interactive avatars and real-time video assistants. Some claim to be able to create user-like avatars from just one minute of video. (A simple test to see how crowded the market is here is to put Synthesia into Google, and check how many companies are buying search ads against their name. There are many.) Synthesia is not immune to product competition. It has been building the “2.0” version of the platform for some time now and has released several related features, including taking yourself in a personal avatar that users can create with a laptop or phone camera that features emotions; a Chrome extension that builds basic videos based on screen data; its own version of an AI video assistant that can turn documents into videos; multi language options; and collaboration features for people to edit videos together. But more importantly, Riparbelli believes the company has an edge by focusing on business users, and investors say that makes the startup attractive. “Synthesia is one of the few AI companies that can take cutting-edge AI and translate it into reality,” Vidu Shanmugarajah, a partner at Google Ventures in London, said in an interview. “Having an extreme customer focus. They are very interested in driving value in a practical setting. Integrating it into a secure and compliant platform is really hard to do. It’s also interesting to see Atlassian investing in this round. The company has injected AI functionality into various apps , and it seems only a matter of time that platforms like Jira can start adding in more video tools to the mix, opening the door to collaboration with portfolio companies.

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