Nvidia fuels Synthesia’s push beyond marketing into HR and training

Synthesia wants to take over your next job interview. And your training. And your company’s internal comms. Not with a human, but with a talking video bot that doesn’t get tired or forget lines.

The London-based startup builds digital people (video avatars) that speak from scripts. Clients type text, and the avatar delivers it. That’s old news.

Now, Synthesia is building something bigger. Not just script readers. These new avatars can answer questions. Real back-and-forth. First target? Sales training. Then comes recruitment and internal HR work.

Funding goes into new talking avatar tech

To build it, Synthesia pulled in $200 million in new funding. The company is now valued at $4 billion. The lead investor was GV, the venture fund owned by Alphabet. Others in the round include Nvidia, Accel, Hedosophia, and Evantic Capital.

Employees also got a tender offer.

This new round almost doubles the startup’s valuation from last year. The CEO, Victor Riparbelli, said the new agents help companies train staff better and faster. “We’re providing one part of the solution today,” Victor said. “The problem is that the other part—the role-playing, the coaching, the feedback—has to be done by humans.”

The funding helps Synthesia push further into enterprise use. Public investors are watching closely. Generative AI is hot, but not many companies in the space are making real business sales. Profits? Even fewer. Video AI costs a lot to run. Big tech players are circling.

Last year, Adobe held talks to buy Synthesia for $3 billion, reported The Information. Victor had already spoken about some of their fundraising goals at the time.

Company shifts from flashy ads to workplace training

Synthesia was launched in 2017 by Victor and three researchers. They were trying to find a product that worked. That changed when ChatGPT came out.

Suddenly, the team could plug chatbot tech into avatars. Now those avatars could talk like real people. Multiple languages. Uses? Training, internal videos, marketing.

The original plan was to create consumer content. Ads. Even movies. In 2024, they made an avatar commercial using Lionel Messi. That’s over now. Victor said they dropped that idea.

Too messy. Too unstable. “If it competes in a newsfeed, that’s not something we want to do,” he said. “A lot of our competitors have gone bust because they tried to tackle these use cases.”

They switched to internal corporate work. And it’s paying off. In April, Synthesia hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That number is now “significantly higher,” Victor said, without giving the current figure.

They’re already working with Microsoft, UBS, and Ford. Vidu Shanmugarajah, a general partner at GV, said Synthesia is growing faster than most of the other startups GV has backed. “They’re solving a real problem,” Vidu said.

Synthesia isn’t doing much business in Silicon Valley. Their biggest customers are in financial services, retail, and healthcare. The team has been testing the new talking avatars for four months.

In one demo, the bot answered questions about sales training. The voice worked. The look was close to real. It missed a few questions and needed to hear them again. The company blamed it on weak Wi-Fi.

Prices for the current avatars vary by how much a company uses them. Prices for the new system are not yet final. Victor also said he practiced with a bot made just for handling interviews before talking to the press.

Last year, Synthesia raised $180 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. The new price makes it one of the top AI startups in the UK. Others in the same group include Wayve and ElevenLabs. But it’s still cheaper than the massive names like OpenAI.

Victor said they could have taken offers with higher valuations, but he wanted something closer to real public company standards.

“Maybe you look cooler because you have a higher valuation,” Victor said. “I would rather have a business that I feel good about.” He added that because they’re putting money into growth and building tech, Synthesia is not profitable yet.

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