Market Sunrise Exclusive: Synthesia

00:00 Brian Sozzi

Well, Nvidia will take center stage this week when it reports its quarterly earnings after the closing bell on Wednesday. One firm that it has backed is the London-based AI startup Synthesia. It uses AI to create lifelike video avatars based on humans, which can be deployed in a range of scenarios, including customer support, sales, and staff training. I spoke to the CEO and founder, Victor Riparbelli.

00:25 Victor Riparbelli

Synthesia is the world’s largest AI video platform for businesses. And and really, what we do is very simple. We help businesses all over the world, big and small, communicate in video, which is very important in 2025, right? People want to watch and listen to their content. They don’t want to read as much as as they used to. And it simply is just table stakes that you can communicate in video today. Now, instead of having to run around with cameras and actors and studios and microphones, all things you usually would need to make video, with the Synthesia platform, we do all that with AI. So it’s kind of like making a PowerPoint deck. You go in, you select one of these avatars, you create one of yourself, then you type out your script, you finalize the rest of your video with some kind of editing, and then you have a video that’s ready to go. So what we’ve seen people use this for so far is everything from product marketing videos, customer support, internal training, sales enablement, and a whole bunch of other use cases, but the goal is to educate or share some kind of message, and they want to do that in video.

02:03 Brian Sozzi

Now, I know that recently, you’ve been working quite a lot on translation. Can you explain what exactly you’ve been doing and how it will work?

02:13 Victor Riparbelli

Yes, we also have another product which is called AI dubbing. An AI dubbing is essentially you take a real video, so that could be any video recorded at any point in time. You put it into our system, and you tell us that you want that video in French, Mandarin, you know, Spanish, whatever language your heart desires. And what we’ll do is we’ll take the video, we will clone the voice in the video, and we will change the lip synchronization so that it looks like you’re actually speaking in a different language without you having to do anything. So it maintains the tone of your voice. It’s actually you speaking in a different language. And it’s essentially a one-click operation. This is really popular for companies to take their existing library of all the videos they’ve created over the last many years and instantly enable them for a global audience.

03:28 Brian Sozzi

Now, you spoke earlier about avatars, and I know you’re working on a next generation avatar, but actually, how useful is that for business?

03:41 Victor Riparbelli

It’s very useful. Anyone, I think, who’s been involved in making a corporate video, even if they look very simple, someone just talking to the camera, I think most people can empathize with the amount of kind of pain that goes into it. The whole production process of setting up cameras, it takes a lot of time and money, and then, often, if you’re an executive, you have to do your lines 15 times because, you know, you can’t remember them, or you don’t feel like you said them the right way. Everything here is much easier. We’re just typing it out. And what we’ve seen is just that when the kind of productivity gain is on a scale like 100x to 1,000x of using normal cameras, there’s so many more use cases that you, all of a sudden, can make a video for that you never would have made a video for before, right? And that’s what a lot of our customers are doing, you know. You take customer support. Most companies’ customer support portal has a lot of like text articles that help customers answer whatever questions they might have. We’ve seen time and time and time again, if you take all those text articles, you turn them into videos, people can self-service much higher. We work with a really big bank in London where the call deflection rate went up by almost 30% just by adding videos to that knowledge base, and that saves tons of money in terms of call centers, right? So there’s so many of these use cases that we unlock because it’s so easy to create video.

05:53 Brian Sozzi

Now, this is a question I’ve asked many business leaders in the AI space. Often, your products could lead to job losses, especially if your products are as good as you think they are. Is that right?

06:14 Victor Riparbelli

I think new technology waves always changes the job market as well, right? And I think, potentially, being a camera operator in 10 or 15 years is not as valuable a job as it is today. But I think no matter how much AI we get, I think humans as part of a business is still incredibly important. So I think jobs will change, maybe some short-term displacement, but I’m not really in the camp of people who think that, within the next three or four years, everything is just going to like radically change. I think it takes pretty long for people, for companies to integrate these technologies. Most of these technologies are not good enough at all yet to necessarily replace someone. And I also think what’s going to happen before that is you’re going to augment, you’re going to augment people, right? So maybe if you’re a recruiter, and you’re using agents to screen people instead of junior candidates, maybe, instead of one recruiter being able to have five calls in a day with candidates, an agent can have 100 calls, and then that junior recruiter can sit and look through all those 100 call recordings to figure out who’s the right person for this job, right? So I think I don’t think it’s, I think it’s too simplistic to just kind of assume that, because AI can do customer support, that those jobs will just sort of disappear.

08:11 Brian Sozzi

And recently, we’ve been hearing a lot of noise about the fact that maybe the AI hype has been overblown. What’s your response to that?

08:25 Victor Riparbelli

I think there are definitely a lot of hype, and I think there are certainly a lot of companies that are taking in lots of funding that probably is not going to go anywhere. But I think on the other hand, it’s very, it’s very real, right? AI is going to transform everything we know about how we work, live, and play. This is not virtual reality and the metaverse where it kind of all fizzled out and didn’t really have too much impact in the actual world. I think it’s very, very clear if you just look at just the people that you know around you, right? How many people use ChatGPT as part of their job or as part of just their daily life? The value is very real. The way that these new technologies usually arrive and integrate into society is that there’s tons of money that’s blown into lots of different companies. A lot of them are going to end up dying, but there’s going to be a few of them that’s going to end up really kind of creating value and changing the world, right? And so I think this is as real as the mobile boom that we saw 10, 15 years ago. It’s as real as the internet 20, 30 years ago, and it’s as real as computers when they were first invented. It is definitely one of those waves that’s going to hold water. But in the short term, I think there’s going to be a lot of investors that lose a lot of money.

10:01 Brian Sozzi

So, Victor, earlier, your company was valued at $2.1 billion when you last raised investment. Nvidia is one of your backers. Adobe’s just invested as well. So where next for Synthesia?

10:15 Victor Riparbelli

Well, for us, you know, our core business is growing really, really quickly. We announced a couple of months ago that we surpassed 100 million ARR. We’re growing 100% year on year. We work with more than 80% of the Fortune 100. So for us, right now, there’s lots of innovation to come. We’re launching our agent product very soon, which means that, instead of just watching videos, you can talk to the video. So if you’re watching a training video, for example, you can get quizzed in real time by the video to make sure you’ve actually understood that content. And so there’s lots of innovation that’s still happening, but it’s also just, at this scale right now, it’s about landing all the customers that we want to work with, helping them become successful, and expanding our contract sizes. I think, you know, we’re no longer in the chatter of this market where everyone’s sort of playing around trying to figure out what works. There’s very real value that’s been driven by our product with our customers. And so there’s a huge scaling game running in parallel with, of course, tons of innovation on the core product and offerings that we have.