A Nvidia-backed platform that turns text into A.I.-generated avatars boosts valuation to $1 billion
An animated avatar generated by the AI video platform Synthesia.
Synthesia
Synthesia, a digital media platform that lets users create artificial intelligence-generated videos, has raked in $90 million from investors — including U.S. chip giant Nvidia, the company told CNBC exclusively.
The London-based company raised the cash in a funding round led by Accel, an early investor in Facebook, Slack and Spotify. Nvidia came in as a strategic investor, putting in an undisclosed amount of money. Other investors include Kleiner Perkins, GV, FirstMark Capital and MMC.
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Founded in 2017 by researchers and entrepreneurs Victor Riparbelli, Matthias Niessner, Steffen Tjerrild and Lourdes Agapito, Synthesia develops software that allows people to make their own digital avatars to deliver corporate presentations, training videos — or even compliments to colleagues in over 120 different languages.
Its ultimate aim is to eliminate cameras, microphones, actors, lengthy edits, and other costs from the professional video production process. To do that, Synthesia has created animated avatars which look and sound like humans, but are generated by AI. The avatars are based on real-life actors who speak in front of a green screen.
“Productivity can be improved because you are reducing the cost of producing the video to that of making a PowerPoint,” Philippe Botteri, at Accel, the lead investor in Synthesia’s Series C, told CNBC, adding that adoption of video has been proliferated by consumer platforms such as YouTube, Netflix and TikTok.
“Video is a much better way to communicate knowledge. When we think about the potential of the company and the valuation, we think about what it can return, [and] in the case of Synthesia, we’re just scratching the surface.”
Synthesia is a form of generative AI, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But the company says it has been working on its own proprietary generative AI for years, and that although ChatGPT may have only recently emerged into public consciousness, generative AI itself isn’t a new technology.
Synthesia sells to enterprise clients, including Tiffany’s, IHG, and Moody’s Analytics. The company doesn’t disclose its sales or revenue metrics, though it says it “consistently driven triple digit growth,” with over 12 million videos produced on the platform to date. The number of users on Synthesia spiked 456% year over year, the company said.
Synthesia plans to ramp up investment into its technology, with a particular focus on advancing its AI research and making Synthesia avatars capable of performing more tasks.
“We work with 35% of the Fortune 100 [with a focus on] product marketing, customer support, customer success — areas of the company you have a lot of text that you want to turn into video,” Riparbelli told CNBC.
“As we’re progressing to the next phase of the next generation of Synthesia technology, it’s all about making the avatars more expressive, be able to do more things, walk around in a room, have conversations,” he added.
Riparbelli explained Nvidia isn’t just a semiconductor manufacturer — it’s also a powerhouse of research and development talent with an army of engineers, academics and researchers who produce papers on the subject.
“They’re not just a chip producer,” he said. “They have amazing research teams that are very much leading in terms of, how do you actually train these large models? What works, what doesn’t work?”
Investor interest in A.I.
Business Insider previously reported that Synthesia was in talks with investors to raise between $50 million and $75 million in new funds at a valuation of around $1 billion.
The report didn’t include detail about Nvidia’s involvement, nor mention the total $90 million sum raised.
Synthesia is one of many firms attracting interest from investors with AI and enterprise software that can reduce costs involved in certain business processes. Companies are looking to reduce expenses everywhere they can to combat climbing inflation and prepare for a possible recession.
Last week, French business planning software company Pigment raised $88 million from investors including Iconiq Growth, Felix Capital, Meritech IVP and FirstMark, in part to ramp up its investment in AI.
Generative AI has been a rare bright spot in a European tech market reeling from declining funding and a pullback in valuations. Investors have rotated out of high-growth tech firms into value sectors with more resilient income generation, such as financials, industrials, energy and consumer staples.
Recently, a report from the venture capital firm Atomico showed funding for Europe’s technology startups was on track to fall a further 39% in 2023 to $51 billion from $83 billion in 2022.
However, AI was one area that drew more investments, Atomico said, with generative AI accounting for 35% of total investment into AI and machine learning firms last year — the highest share ever and a big jump from 5% in 2022.
Ethical concerns about deepfakes
There are concerns that the use of video AI tools as advanced as Synthesia could lead to deepfakes, videos which take a user’s likeness and manipulate it to make it appear as though they are saying or doing something they’re not.
There has also been an increasing number of calls from tech leaders and academics for a global pause on AI development beyond systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4, because of fears that the technology is becoming so advanced it may pose an existential risk to humanity.
Synthesia first attracted mainstream attention in 2019 for a deepfake video that featured a digitally animated version of celebrity footballer David Beckham speaking about a campaign to end malaria in nine languages.
While that was done with the consent of Beckham and for a good cause, more widespread use of deepfake technology has led to worries about the potential for misinformation.
To address that, Synthesia says it has kept ethics in mind while developing its software. The company requires consent from the people who feature as avatars in its software, and uses a mix of humans and machine learning to target material such as profanity and hate speech.
It is also signed up to Responsible Practices for Synthetic Media, a voluntary industrywide framework for the ethical and responsible development, creation and sharing of synthetic media.
“There are many different discourses going on right now. There’s one about the very long-term existential sort of risk scenarios. I think they’re important to talk about as well. But I’d love to see more focus on where are we today?” Riparbelli told CNBC in an interview.
“These technologies are already powerful. How do we deal with hallucinations? How do we deal with all of the problems that arise?” he added. “There’s definitely pitfalls. But there’s also just so much opportunity in it, I think, leveling the playing field and enabling people to do much more with less.”
Technology
Alibaba-backed Moonshot releases new Kimi AI model that beats ChatGPT, Claude in coding — and it costs less
An AI sign at the MWC Shanghai tech show on June 19, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
BEIJING — The latest Chinese generative artificial intelligence model to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT is offering coding capabilities — at a lower price.
Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot released on late Friday night its Kimi K2 model: a low-cost, open source large language model — the two factors that underpinned China-based DeepSeek’s industry disruption in January. Open-source technology provides source code access for free, an approach that few U.S. tech giants have taken, other than Meta and Google to some extent.
Coincidentally, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced early Saturday that there would be an indefinite delay of its first open-source model yet again due to safety concerns. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on Kimi K2.
One of Kimi K2’s strengths is in writing computer code for applications, an area in which businesses see potential to reduce or replace staff with generative AI. OpenAI’s U.S. rival Anthropic focused on coding with its Claude Opus 4 model released in late May.
In its release announcement on social media platforms X and GitHub, Moonshot claimed Kimi K2 surpassed Claude Opus 4 on two benchmarks, and had better overall performance than OpenAI’s coding-focused GPT-4.1 model, based on several industry metrics.
“No doubt [Kimi K2 is] a globally competitive model, and it’s open sourced,” Wei Sun, principal analyst in artificial intelligence at Counterpoint, said in an email Monday.
Cheaper option
“On top of that, it has lower token costs, making it attractive for large-scale or budget-sensitive deployments,” she said.
The new K2 model is available via Kimi’s app and browser interface for free unlike ChatGPT or Claude, which charge monthly subscriptions for their latest AI models.
Kimi is also only charging 15 cents for every 1 million input tokens, and $2.50 per 1 million output tokens, according to its website. Tokens are a way of measuring data for AI model processing.
In contrast, Claude Opus 4 charges 100 times more for input — $15 per million tokens — and 30 times more for output — $75 per million tokens. Meanwhile, for every one million tokens, GPT-4.1 charges $2 for input and $8 for output.
Moonshot AI said on GitHub that developers can use K2 however they wish, with the only requirement that they display “Kimi K2” on the user interface if the commercial product or service has more than 100 million monthly active users, or makes the equivalent of $20 million in monthly revenue.
Hot AI market
Initial reviews of K2 on both English and Chinese social media have largely been positive, although there are some reports of hallucinations, a prevalent issue in generative AI, in which the models make up information.
Still, K2 is “the first model I feel comfortable using in production since Claude 3.5 Sonnet,” Pietro Schirano, founder of startup MagicPath that offers AI tools for design, said in a post on X.
Moonshot has open sourced some of its prior AI models. The company’s chatbot surged in popularity early last year as China’s alternative to ChatGPT, which isn’t officially available in the country. But similar chatbots from ByteDance and Tencent have since crowded the market, while tech giant Baidu has revamped its core search engine with AI tools.
Kimi’s latest AI release comes as investors eye Chinese alternatives to U.S. tech in the global AI competition.
Still, despite the excitement about DeepSeek, the privately-held company has yet to announce a major upgrade to its R1 and V3 model. Meanwhile, Manus AI, a Chinese startup that emerged earlier this year as another DeepSeek-type upstart, has relocated its headquarters to Singapore.
Over in the U.S., OpenAI also has yet to reveal GPT-5.
Work on GPT-5 may be taking up engineering resources, preventing OpenAI from progressing on its open-source model, Counterpoint’s Sun said, adding that it’s challenging to release a powerful open-source model without undermining the competitive advantage of a proprietary model.
Grok 4 competitor
Kimi K2 is not the company’s only recent release. Moonshot launched a Kimi research model last month and claimed it matched Google’s Gemini Deep Research ‘s 26.9 score and beat OpenAI’s version on a benchmark called “Humanity’s Last Exam.”
The Kimi research model even got a mention last week during Elon Musk’s xAI release of Grok 4 — which scored 25.4 on its own on the “Humanity’s Last Exam” benchmark, but attained a 44.4 score when allowed to use a variety of AI tools and web search.
“Kimi-Researcher represents a paradigm shift in agentic AI,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law. He was referring to AI’s capability of simultaneously making several decisions on its own to complete a complex task.
“Instead of merely generating fluent responses, it demonstrates autonomous reasoning at an expert level — the kind of complex cognitive work previously missing from LLMs,” Ma said. He is also author of “The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace.”
— CNBC’s Victoria Yeo contributed to this report.
Co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., Jensen Huang attends the 9th edition of the VivaTech trade show in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Chesnot | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has downplayed U.S. fears that his firm’s chips will aid the Chinese military, days ahead of another trip to the country as he attempts to walk a tightrope between Washington and Beijing.
In an interview with CNN aired Sunday, Huang said “we don’t have to worry about” China’s military using U.S.-made technology because “they simply can’t rely on it.”
“It could be limited at any time; not to mention, there’s plenty of computing capacity in China already,” Huang said. “They don’t need Nvidia’s chips, certainly, or American tech stacks in order to build their military,” he added.
The comments were made in reference to years of bipartisan U.S. policy that placed restrictions on semiconductor companies, prohibiting them from selling their most advanced artificial intelligence chips to clients in China.
Huang also repeated past criticisms of the policies, arguing that the tactic of export controls has been counterproductive to the ultimate goal of U.S. tech leadership.
“We want the American tech stack to be the global standard … in order for us to do that, we have to be in search of all the AI developers in the world,” Huang said, adding that half of the world’s AI developers are in China.
That means for America to be an AI leader, U.S. technology has to be available to all markets, including China, he added.
Washington’s latest restrictions on Nvidia’s sales to China were implemented in April and are expected to result in billions in losses for the company. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.
Huang’s CNN interview came just days before he travels to China for his second trip to the country this year, and as Nvidia is reportedly working on another chip that is compliant with the latest export controls.
Last week, the Nvidia CEO met with U.S. President Donald Trump, and was warned by U.S. lawmakers not to meet with companies connected to China’s military or intelligence bodies, or entities named on America’s restricted export list.
According to Daniel Newman, CEO of tech advisory firm The Futurum Group, Huang’s CNN interview exemplifies how Huang has been threading a needle between Washington and Beijing as it tries to maintain maximum market access.
“He needs to walk a proverbial tightrope to make sure that he doesn’t rattle the Trump administration,” Newman said, adding that he also wants to be in a position for China to invest in Nvidia technology if and when the policy provides a better climate to do so.
But that’s not to say that his downplaying of Washington’s concerns is valid, according to Newman. “I think it’s hard to completely accept the idea that China couldn’t use Nvidia’s most advanced technologies for military use.”
He added that he would expect Nvidia’s technology to be at the core of any country’s AI training, including for use in the development of advanced weaponry.
A U.S. official told Reuters last month that China’s large language model startup DeepSeek — which says it used Nvidia chips to train its models — was supporting China’s military and intelligence operations.
On Sunday, Huang acknowledged there were concerns about DeepSeek’s open-source R1 reasoning model being trained in China but said that there was no evidence that it presents dangers for that reason alone.
Huang complimented the R1 reasoning model, calling it “revolutionary,” and said its open-source nature has empowered startup companies, new industries, and countries to be able to engage in AI.
“The fact of the matter is, [China and the U.S.] are competitors, but we are highly interdependent, and to the extent that we can compete and both aspire to win, it is fine to respect our competitors,” he concluded.
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