Synthesia Raises $400 Million for AI Avatar Platform

British AI startup Synthesia is now a $4 billion company after raising $200 million.

The company, which makes artificial intelligence avatars for businesses to use for in-house and external communication, announced its Series E funding round Monday (Jan. 26), with the venture capital arms of Google and Nvidia among the investors.

Synthesia says it plans to use the new capital to build on its AI video platform, enhancing its virtual communication offering and creating new enterprise products.

“Why? Because we believe the winning companies of the future will be the ones who can teach employees how to leverage the power of AI at work,” Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia’s co-founder and CEO, said in the announcement.

“Automation is a very important value driver, but upskilling your workforce to build their own automations is going to be even more important.”

The round came a little over a year after Synthesia raised $180 million in a funding round that valued the company at $2.1 billion.

PYMNTS wrote last year about the implications of AI-generated avatar use in the B2B world, arguing that the “economics may turn out to be compelling” for enterprise sales teams. An account executive can only handle so many client conversations each week before running into cognitive fatigue and scheduling bottlenecks, the report argued.

“An AI avatar, by contrast, scales elastically. In theory, a firm could ‘staff’ hundreds of simultaneous discovery calls, nurturing prospects across time zones and languages at negligible marginal cost,” PYMNTS added.

“At the same time, B2B teams risk the threat of agentic avatars turning out to be merely artificial polish. And nothing is more deadly to a sales target than one-size-fits-all inauthenticity.”

For this system to work, the report continues, artificial intelligence avatars need to master a precise blend of natural language understanding, real-time rendering and context-sensitive reasoning.

“The stakes are higher than casual chatbots; sales conversations are nuanced, with subtle cues, objections and relationship dynamics,” PYMNTS wrote. “An avatar that fumbles a key industry acronym or mishandles a skeptical prospect could undermine a company’s reputation.”

There’s also greater risk of fraud. AI has made it tougher to combat fraud, according to research from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Rising Risk: Confronting Modern AP Fraud Threats,” with account payable teams dealing with issues such as AI-generated deepfakes and impersonations.

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