Synthesia raises $90M Series C, becomes AI-video unicorn

Synthesia, a London-based company that lets users generate videos of talking AI avatars from a text script, raised a $90 million Series C led by Accel — its first round led by a European investor — with Nvidia’s venture arm joining alongside existing backers Kleiner Perkins, GV and Firstmark Capital. The round valued the company at $1 billion, up from $300 million at its previous raise in December 2021, and brought its total funding to roughly $156.6 million.

The company’s product lets a customer type text, pick a synthetic avatar and a language, and receive a finished video without filming or voice-acting — pitched primarily at corporate training and marketing content rather than entertainment. Synthesia said it had more than 50,000 customers and had generated over 15 million videos by the time of the raise, with clients including Tiffany’s, IHG and United Nations agencies; the company claimed roughly 35% of Fortune 100 companies used its platform in some form.

The raise came amid a wider surge of venture investment into generative-media start-ups following ChatGPT’s launch the previous November, and made Synthesia one of the earlier “AI video” companies to reach unicorn status — well before OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo brought text-to-video generation to mainstream attention in 2024.