Synthesia, the market chief in AI video technology, is asserting this morning an thrilling $90M Sequence C financing.

This can be a nice milestone for the corporate, making it a newly-minted unicorn and including sturdy new companions (Accel, Nvidia, and a few nice people) to the group. Past the fundraising momentum and accolades, nevertheless, Synthesia has before everything been constructing a very spectacular enterprise. Over 35% of the Fortune 100 now use Synthesia’s enterprise providing, and over 50,000 companies use its self-serve product.

A lot to their credit score, the corporate’s founders (Victor, Steffen, Lourdes and Matthias) had been very early to the Generative AI wave, beginning the corporate at a time (2017) when there was important know-how threat and limitations, to the purpose that what they had been doing was in all probability a bit bizarre, if not outright loopy. A number of years later, by the point FirstMark led the Sequence A early 2021, the time period “generative AI” was nonetheless not a factor – my weblog submit asserting the spherical used the time period “video as code” and in my 2021 MAD panorama, Synthesia appeared in a field we known as “artificial media”, for lack of a greater time period.

Anecdotally, this Sequence C is one other instance of the expansion market displaying some signal of life recently, at the very least for A+ corporations, in the identical vein as Pigment’s current announcement, albeit maybe much less surprisingly given the hype round Generative AI.

Given the explosion of Generative AI and the flood of name new startups that had been created within the area over the past 6 months, there are attention-grabbing early classes to be taught from Synthesia’s journey to date:

Proprietary AI does matter: Within the present feverish AI hype cycle, many individuals have been fast to leap to conclusions – constructing an AI firm means leveraging OpenAI or different basis mannequin suppliers; there’s no aggressive benefit or sustainability to construct round know-how; AI is getting commoditized, and so forth. In sharp distinction to that line of pondering, Synthesia has constructed a really sturdy AI utilized analysis group through the years (co-founder Lourdes Agapito and Matthias Nissner are each outstanding AI lecturers). Whereas it may leverage third celebration foundational mannequin know-how opportunistically, the corporate has developed industry-leading, proprietary AI within the area of AI-generated, life-like avatars, making it clearly stand aside from every other resolution in the marketplace.

An excellent product is broader than simply AI: Whereas it’s recognized for the standard of its AI avatars, the Synthesia platform is way broader than that. It’s an enterprise-grade AI video technology platform that allows groups to collaborate and construct nice movies for all types of enterprise functions. Avatars will not be even required. The Synthesia platform replaces cumbersome processes the place actors, administrators and cameras are required. It additionally replaces boring PDF content material and even Powerpoint. There’s lots of infrastructure, workflow, permissioning, collaboration, safety and so forth concerned in constructing such a product.

Fixing enterprise issues: In each AI hype cycle I’ve skilled, there’s a first part the place many get enamored with the ability of the know-how and dream up 1,000,000 use instances – at all times a enjoyable part. Nevertheless, rapidly sufficient, the mud settles and a easy actuality emerges: It’s not in regards to the AI, it’s about what enterprise issues one solves with AI. Because the cycle progresses, it’s at all times telling to see vendor web site messages evolve from being very AI-centric at first, to being very enterprise solution-centric just a few months or years later, barely mentioning AI on their house web page. The Synthesia founders understood this actuality very early on, and a giant a part of the success of the corporate has been their intuition to eschew flashy use instances, and as a substitute level the know-how at core enterprise issues and large, Fortune 100 kind prospects.

Congrats to the group on this nice milestone, and excited for the journey forward!

Oh – and right here’s my use case: