Synthesia, the market leader in AI video generation, announced their exciting $90 million Series C financing. The round is led by Philippe Botteri at Accel along with NVIDIA and existing investors. The company now officially hits unicorn status, and we are extremely proud of the brilliant co-founders, Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild, Dr. Lourdes Agapito and Dr. Matthias Niessner, and the entire Synthesia team!

We were first introduced to Victor and Steffen in November 2018. Ever since our first meeting, we agreed with their vision to empower everyone to make video content without cameras, microphones, or studios. Using AI, they planned to change the process of content creation and unleash human creativity for good – they are delivering it!

We led their $3.1 million Seed financing in 2019 along with co-investors Seedcamp, MMC Ventures, TinyVC, VAS Ventures, Nigel Morris, Taavet Hinrikus and earlier investor Mark Cuban.

At that time, others questioned whether Synthesia was just a product feature, and/or whether there was a significant market opportunity. We are always looking to partner with brilliant technical teams who are building leapfrog, moonshot solutions to big problems like Synthesia in the very early days, and we are comfortable with technology and business risks.

Their $12.5 million Series A was led by Matt Turck of FirstMark Capital, and their $50 million Series B was later led by Josh Coyne at Kleiner Perkins along with Vidu Shanmugarajah at GV. Synthesia’s impressive customer growth now exceeds 50,000 companies leveraging their platform. Industry giants such as Google, Reuters, Nike, Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, and many more use Synthesia to generate videos for corporate training and e-learning, create personalized marketing and sales campaigns and even deliver breaking news segments.

In April 2023, Synthesia was recognized as one of the top 50 AI companies by Forbes, Sequoia and Meritech Capital. Synthesia continues to add exciting product features (such as 139 languages & accents, 658 voices, and animation markers). Most recently, Synthesia’s research group released “HumanRF: High-Fidelity Neural Radiance Fields for Humans in Motion” – a 4D dynamic neural scene representation that captures full-body appearance in motion from multi-view video input and enables playback from the novel, unseen viewpoints.

With this new round of funding, the team will be accelerating their AI research, further building out their collaborative video editing platform and much more.

Synthesia’s milestone validates the transformative power of brilliant people with unique domain expertise, deep technical backgrounds and the drive to execute. This reinforces our thesis that visual technologies and AI are pivotal in shaping the future. The success of Synthesia serves as a resounding testament to the endless possibilities that lie ahead. As the demand for AI-driven content creation continues to surge, we are confident that Synthesia will remain at the forefront of redefining the boundaries of what is possible.

At LDV Capital, we are honored to have played a very small part in their incredible journey which continues to evolve every day. We extend our congratulations to the four exceptional co-founders and the entire Synthesia team for their extraordinary achievements!

Take a look at the keynote addresses given by Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild, Dr. Lourdes Agapito, Dr. Matthias Niessner and Dr. Jon Starck during our Annual LDV Vision Summit over the last few years.