Where Synthesia is Going Next: Announcing our Series C

Hey there, dear Synthesia customer 👋

(In case you don't know me-- I'm Victor, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia.)

At Synthesia, our mission is to make video easy for everyone. Today, I’m excited to announce our latest round of funding, a $90m Series C that will accelerate us towards our vision even faster.

Since we founded the company 6 years ago we’ve come far. More than 50,000 businesses - including a third of the Fortune 100 - use our AI platform to create videos and we’re a team of +200 amazing Synthesians who make it all possible. 

Seeing our thousands of users (you can read 700+ reviews here), of all skill-levels, creating and collaborating on making video content in Synthesia is truly magical. When I hear customers tell us that Synthesia makes their lives easier and their communications better I know we’re making progress towards our vision.

Synthesia has unlocked new possibilities for creating and maintaining high-quality training videos, improving learning experiences, and promoting diversity and inclusion. Ivan Tanchev, Multimedia Development Manager at Network Rail

The recent progress in AI has been astonishing. It feels like we’re seeing advancements we didn’t expect until 2030, but here they are in 2023.

It’s an incredible time to build and we’ve got a lot in store for the coming years.

Series C Funding Round

First, the lowdown. We’re excited for Accel to lead the $90m Series C with Philippe Botteri taking a board seat. Their track-record speaks for itself: they have partnered with many iconic companies that we look up to like Webflow, Miro and Algolia through their most critical inflection points.

We’ve known the Accel team for years and one thing that stood out was a shared philosophy on how to build great companies, and in particular how to strike the right balance between visionary and useful technology. Right now, there’s a lot of cool demos, big promises and what-if's in AI. It was really important to us to partner with a fund that is as focussed as we are on delivering real, tangible business value.

As a European company we’re also thrilled to partner with a local lead investor for our Series C, which is a first for us.

I am also thrilled that NVIDIA, one of the leading forces in AI today, has come on board to support Synthesia. We’re already happy customers and as we make additional progress towards training large AI models, NVIDIA’s expertise will be incredibly valuable to our AI research efforts.

We’re also lucky to add a bunch of amazing CEOs and operators to the cap table and look forward to learning from them. 

Our existing backers Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Firstmark Capital have also been tremendous throughout our journey and it means so much to have them participate in our Series C.

What’s next for you?

With this new round of funding we’ll be accelerating our AI research and further build out our collaborative video editing platform. 

First, on the AI side of things, we’re working on the next generation of avatar technology that’ll make the avatars much better on every parameter:

• more expressions,
• more natural movements,
• better voices and
• simple customization options.

Some of you might also have seen our work on HumanRF, our first research paper in collaboration with TUM. In the coming years we’ll be advancing avatars to be able to do much more than just talk to the camera, and this is a step towards that. We’ve got some seriously cool tech cooking that’ll be able to show next year.

Here's a quick glimpse into the future of our talking avatar AI tech:

We’re also working on making the entire Synthesia platform faster, more powerful and collaborative.

This year we’ve already launched teams, workspaces and a host of other collaborative features.

There’s much more to come to the platform:

• real-time collaboration,
• better sharing functionality,
• easier invite flows,
• audit logs,
• mobile formats,
• two avatars on screen,
• better video editing functionality...

The video editing experience has also been upgraded significantly this year. We introduced markers, a new and AI-native interface to ease animation work, GPT-powered script writing and many other features.

Also - remember the EDIT button?

Last, but not least, we’ll also be working on ironing the small details: app performance, UX kinks and other annoyances that inevitably sneak in when shipping at Synthesia velocity.

Thank you to everyone for supporting us on our journey - we deeply appreciate it!

/Victor Riparbelli