Who are Synthesia? The Future of AI Video

If you work in HR, Learning & Development, internal communications, or corporate training, chances are you have heard of Synthesia. And if you have not yet, you almost certainly will. Founded in London in 2017 by Victor Riparbelli, Lourdes Agapito, Matthias Niessner, and Steffen Tjerrild - researchers and entrepreneurs from UCL, Stanford, and Cambridge - Synthesia has grown from an ambitious AI research project into one of the most exciting enterprise technology companies in the UK, and arguably the world. With a $4 billion valuation following a $200 million Series E round led by Google’s GV in early 2026 – backed by Nvidia’s NVentures, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, and NEA – the company’s trajectory is remarkable.

The problem Synthesia set out to solve will resonate with anyone who has sat through a dull compliance training module, received a fifty-slide onboarding deck, or tried to communicate a complex message across a global workforce in a dozen different languages. Traditional video production is expensive, slow, and requires studios, cameras, actors, and editors. Most organisations simply cannot afford to create video content at the scale they need it. Synthesia’s answer is elegantly simple: use AI to turn a text script into a professional-quality video, complete with a realistic AI avatar presenter, in minutes, in over 160 languages, at a fraction of the cost of conventional production.

What began as a pioneering AI research concept has evolved into a fully-fledged enterprise platform trusted by over 60,000 customers, including more than 60% of the Fortune 100. With over $100 million in annual recurring revenue and some of the most prestigious investors in the technology world behind it, Synthesia is not just an interesting AI experiment. It is a commercially validated, fast-growing business that is reshaping how the world’s biggest organisations communicate, train, and share knowledge.

What Does Synthesia Do?

Synthesia is an AI video creation platform. Users log in to a browser-based studio, type or paste a script, select an AI avatar from a library of over 240 diverse, realistic presenters – or create their own custom avatar using a short video recording – choose a language and voice, and click generate. Within minutes, a finished, professional-quality video is ready to share, embed, or export. No cameras. No studios. No actors. No expensive post-production.

The platform supports over 160 languages and 900 voices, making it particularly powerful for global organisations that need to deliver consistent messages across diverse workforces. The average Synthesia enterprise customer creates content in seven different languages, and 40% of all videos generated on the platform are translated versions of existing content – a clear signal that multilingual communication is not a nice-to-have for their customers; it is a core business requirement.

Beyond the fundamentals, Synthesia has built a rich set of enterprise-grade capabilities. The platform includes a collaborative video editor with real-time team workspaces, version control, commenting, and user roles. It integrates natively with major Learning Management Systems (LMS), supporting SCORM export so that training videos can be deployed directly into platforms like Workday Learning, SAP SuccessFactors, or Cornerstone. An AI screen recorder allows users to capture workflows and turn them into narrated how-to videos with minimal effort. Analytics and viewer engagement data help teams understand which content is landing and which is not. Brand kits allow organisations to maintain visual consistency across all video output.

One of the most exciting recent developments is Synthesia’s move into interactive and agentic video. The company is now building AI video agents – interactive experiences where viewers can ask questions, explore branching scenarios, and receive tailored responses in real time, rather than passively watching a linear video. This transforms training and communication content from something employees sit through into something they actively engage with. With the Series E funding, Synthesia has made agentic video capabilities a centrepiece of its next chapter, and early indications suggest this is a genuinely differentiated capability that competitors are yet to match at scale.

Who Uses Synthesia?

Synthesia is firmly positioned as an enterprise platform, though it also offers accessible entry-level plans for individuals and small teams. Pricing starts at around £18 per month for the Starter plan, scaling through Business plans and into bespoke Enterprise arrangements for large organisations. The Enterprise tier includes dedicated customer success support, advanced security configurations, and the full breadth of the platform’s collaboration and governance features.

The platform has particularly deep penetration in Learning and Development, HR, and Internal Communications functions. Any organisation with a significant training requirement – whether that is employee onboarding, compliance training, product knowledge, or skills development – is a natural Synthesia customer. Customers include DuPont, Xerox, Spirit Airlines, and a significant proportion of the Fortune 100, reflecting both the breadth of the opportunity and the trust that large enterprises place in the platform.

Beyond L&D, Synthesia is increasingly used for sales enablement, product marketing, customer support, and external communications. As organisations seek more engaging and cost-effective ways to communicate complex messages to customers, partners, and employees alike, the platform’s use cases continue to expand. The fact that the average customer creates content in seven languages illustrates how central Synthesia has become to the operational fabric of global enterprise communication.

From a buyer perspective, the typical champions within organisations are Heads of L&D, Chief People Officers, Internal Communications Directors, and increasingly Chief Digital Officers or heads of AI transformation who recognise Synthesia as one of the more pragmatic, immediately valuable AI tools available to the workforce. The combination of a fast time-to-value, intuitive interface, and genuine ROI – replacing expensive video production with a platform that non-technical users can operate independently – makes the business case relatively straightforward.

Synthesia Competitors

The enterprise AI video market is growing rapidly, and Synthesia’s success has attracted a range of competitors. Understanding where Synthesia sits relative to its rivals is important context for any organisation evaluating this space.

HeyGen is arguably the most prominent competitor, and the one Synthesia is most frequently compared against. HeyGen has grown quickly and targets a broad audience ranging from individual creators and marketers through to enterprises. Its avatars are expressive and lifelike, and the platform is particularly strong for social media content and marketing video. However, HeyGen lags behind Synthesia in enterprise-grade security (notably missing ISO 42001 and ISO 27001 certifications), governance features, and collaboration tooling. It also has a more permissive approach to custom avatar creation that raises consent and safety concerns that enterprise security teams tend to flag. For large organisations with serious compliance requirements, Synthesia remains the safer choice.

Colossyan positions itself as a purpose-built L&D platform with strong SCORM export capabilities, branching scenario support, and LMS integrations. It is generally considered more budget-friendly than Synthesia and has a loyal following among instructional designers and smaller L&D teams. However, Colossyan’s avatar realism, rendering speed, and enterprise scalability fall short of Synthesia’s benchmarks, and it lacks the breadth of features and language support that global enterprises require.

D-ID and Hour One are earlier entrants in the AI avatar video space, both of which have carved niches in specific use cases such as customer-facing digital agents and personalised video at scale. Neither has matched Synthesia’s enterprise traction or the depth of its platform capabilities.

Adobe, notably, explored acquiring Synthesia earlier in 2025 at a reported valuation of $3 billion before failing to agree on price. The fact that Adobe – the world’s leading creative software company – saw sufficient strategic value to pursue this acquisition is perhaps the strongest possible external validation of what Synthesia has built. Adobe has since made a strategic investment via Adobe Ventures, signalling an ongoing partnership rather than an outright acquisition.

What Makes Synthesia Different?

In a market where dozens of vendors now claim AI video capabilities, several factors genuinely set Synthesia apart.

Enterprise security and compliance is Synthesia’s most important commercial differentiator for large organisations. The platform is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and ISO 42001 certified, and maintains strict content moderation policies. Critically, Synthesia only creates AI avatars with the explicit consent of the person being represented – a policy that matters enormously in a world increasingly concerned about deepfakes and synthetic media misuse. This commitment to responsible AI is not just an ethical stance; it is a commercial advantage, as it removes a major objection from procurement and legal teams at large enterprises.

Avatar realism and expressiveness is where Synthesia’s research heritage pays dividends. The company operates at the application layer but also maintains a dedicated R&D team advancing the underlying models for audio and video generation. Synthesia’s avatars adapt their tone of voice, body movement, and facial expressions to match the context of a script – expressing appropriate emotion rather than delivering every message in the same neutral tone. This ‘micro-gesture’ technology creates a meaningfully more human viewing experience, which matters when organisations are trying to engage learners and employees with the content.

Multilingual capability at scale is a genuine operational differentiator. Supporting over 160 languages with 900+ voices, and offering a multilingual video player that automatically serves content in a viewer’s preferred language without requiring separate videos to be rendered for each locale, Synthesia solves a problem that global organisations genuinely wrestle with. The ability to take a single piece of training content and deploy it meaningfully across a workforce spanning dozens of countries is a compelling proposition.

Speed of content creation and iteration transforms the economics of video for organisations. Traditional video production that might take days or weeks of studio time, editing, and review cycles can be completed in hours on Synthesia. More importantly, updating content when policies, products, or processes change – a perennial problem with traditional video – becomes trivially simple: edit the script and regenerate. This dramatically lowers the total cost of ownership for video-based communications over time.

Strategic investor alignment deserves a mention. The presence of Nvidia’s NVentures and Google’s GV as lead investors signals more than just financial backing. These are investors with deep interests in the AI infrastructure and application layers, and their participation suggests confidence that Synthesia’s technology is genuinely at the frontier of what’s possible in generative AI for video. The Adobe Ventures partnership similarly positions Synthesia within the broader ecosystem of creative and enterprise software tools.

Where is Synthesia Going? Our View on the Future

Synthesia is at an inflection point. It has established a dominant market position in enterprise AI video, achieved $100 million ARR, closed a $200 million funding round at a $4 billion valuation, and now has the resources and the investor backing to pursue a much larger ambition. And the ambition is clear: Synthesia wants to become the platform through which the world’s best companies teach, train, and communicate with their workforces.

The move into agentic video is, in our view, the most strategically significant development to watch. Interactive AI video – where employees can engage with training content conversationally, explore scenarios, ask questions, and receive personalised responses – is a fundamentally different proposition from passive video consumption. It blurs the line between video platform and AI tutor, and it does so in a way that is scalable across hundreds of thousands of employees simultaneously. As AI agents become more capable and enterprises accelerate their investment in workforce upskilling (which CEO Victor Riparbelli has identified as a board-level priority across their customer base), Synthesia is positioning itself at the centre of that conversation in a way that few others are.

Geographic expansion is the other major near-term opportunity. The Series D funding explicitly earmarked investment in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Japan in particular is a market that Synthesia has identified as a strategic priority, and the combination of complex localisation requirements, large enterprise workforces, and high spend on corporate training makes it a natural fit. With Atlassian as a Series D backer and expanding global distribution, the infrastructure for meaningful international growth is being put in place.

Longer term, we believe Synthesia has the potential to expand beyond its current L&D and internal communications heartland into customer-facing video at scale. Personalised, AI-generated product explainers, customer support videos, and multilingual marketing content are all adjacent use cases that the platform’s capabilities would support. The integration of AI agents into video experiences opens up further possibilities for interactive customer engagement that would have been prohibitively expensive to produce with traditional methods.

The competitive moat is also likely to deepen over time. Synthesia’s trust advantage – built on years of relationships with Fortune 100 procurement and security teams, robust compliance credentials, and a demonstrated commitment to responsible AI – is not easily or quickly replicated. As regulators in Europe and elsewhere pay increasing attention to synthetic media and deepfake risks, Synthesia’s safety-first architecture is likely to become a more significant differentiator, not less.

Synthesia – Our Viewpoint

Synthesia is one of the most compelling enterprise technology businesses we have come across in recent years. It has identified a genuine, universal problem – the high cost and slow pace of professional video content creation – and built a platform that solves it with remarkable elegance. The commercial traction speaks for itself: over 60,000 customers, $100 million ARR, strategic investment from Adobe, and backing from Google, Nvidia, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, and NEA.

What particularly impresses us is the balance Synthesia has struck between frontier AI capability and practical enterprise deployability. This is a company with serious research depth – its founding team comes from world-leading academic institutions, and it maintains active R&D investment in its underlying models – that has also built the security, compliance, collaboration, and support infrastructure that enterprise buyers actually require. That combination is harder to achieve than it looks, and it is why Synthesia has built the trust of organisations that have highly demanding procurement requirements.

The move into agentic and interactive video capabilities is, in our view, the right strategic bet for this moment. The convergence of increasingly capable AI agents and growing enterprise investment in workforce upskilling creates a genuinely large opportunity that Synthesia is well placed to capture. The $200 million Series E gives them the runway to execute at scale, and the quality of the investor syndicate provides further confidence in the long-term trajectory.

For organisations evaluating enterprise video platforms – whether for training, internal communications, sales enablement, or customer-facing content – Synthesia deserves serious attention. It is the market leader for good reason, and the gap between Synthesia and its nearest competitors in terms of enterprise capability, security, and avatar quality remains meaningful. For organisations with complex multilingual requirements or large global workforces, it is difficult to make a case for choosing anything else.

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