Synthesia Becomes a Unicorn with NVIDIA Backed Fundraise

Synthesia is the latest AI startup to reach a valuation of $1 billion after raising a $90 million series C fund. The round was led by Accel Ventures with NVentures - NVIDIA’s venture capital arm along with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, GV, Firstmark Capital, Alex Wang, Olivier Pomel and Amjad Masad.

Synthesia plans to allocate the funds towards AI research, furthering its partnerships with renowned educational institutions such as TUM in Munich and UCL in London.

Philippe Botteri, the lead investor from Accel in the funding, said that, “Productivity can be improved because you are reducing the cost of producing the video to that of making a PowerPoint,” stating that TikTok, Netflix, and YouTube have made it easier for adoption of video. 

"While we weren't actively looking for new investment, Accel and NVIDIA share our vision for transforming traditional video production into a digital workflow," said Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia. 

Founded in 2017, Synthesia is a London-based digital media platform startup that creates AI generated videos. 

It was started by a team of researchers and entrepreneurs including Victor Riparbelli, Matthias Niessner, Steffen Tjerrild, and Lourdes Agapito, specialising in software development. Their innovative software enables individuals to create personalised digital avatars for various purposes, such as delivering corporate presentations, training videos, or even expressing compliments to colleagues, in over 120 diverse languages.

Synthesia caters to enterprise customers such as Tiffany's, IHG, and Moody's Analytics. While the company does not publicly disclose specific sales or revenue figures, it has reported consistent triple-digit growth. To date, the platform has facilitated the creation of over 12 million videos. Synthesia also highlighted a remarkable 456% year-over-year increase in the number of users on its platform.

Remarkably, it seems like no other company has been benefitting from the AI boom as much as NVIDIA. The company became the first chip firm to reach a trillion dollar valuation. Recently, NVIDIA also backed Cohere, reaching a valuation of $2.2 billion.