LONDON — Synthesia, a video platform that uses artificial intelligence to generate clips featuring multilingual human avatars, has raised $180 million in an investment round valuing the startup at $2.1 billion.

That’s more than than double the $1 billion Synthesia was worth in its last financing in 2023.

The London-based startup said Wednesday that the funding round was led by venture firm NEA with participation from Atlassian Ventures, World Innovation Lab and PSP Growth.

NEA counts Uber and TikTok parent company ByteDance among its portfolio companies. Synthesia is also backed by chip giant Nvidia.

Victor Riparbelli, CEO of Synthesia, told CNBC that investors appraised the businesses differently from other companies in the space due to its focus on “utility.”

“Of course, the hype cycle is beneficial to us,” Riparbelli said in an interview. “For us, what’s important is building an actually good business.”

Synthesia isn’t “dependent” on venture capital — as opposed to companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral, Riparbelli added.

These startups have raised billions of dollars at eye-watering valuations while burning through sizable amounts of money to train and develop their foundational AI models.

Synthesia’s not the only startup shaking up the world of video production with AI. Other startups offer solutions for producing and editing video content with AI, like Veed.io and Runway.

Meanwhile, the likes of OpenAI and Adobe have also developed generative AI tools for video creation.

Eric Liaw, a London-based partner at VC firm IVP, told CNBC that companies at the application layer of AI haven’t garnered as much investor hype as firms in the infrastructure layer.

“The amount of money that the application layer companies need to raise isn’t as large — and therefore the valuations aren’t necessarily as eye popping” as companies like Nvidia,” Liaw told CNBC last month.

Riparbelli said that money raised from the latest financing round would be used to invest in “more of the same,” furthering product development and investing more into security and compliance.

Last year, Synthesia made a series of updates to its platform, including the ability to produce AI avatars using a laptop webcam or phone, full-body avatars with arms and hands and a screen recording tool that has an AI avatar guide users through what they’re viewing.

On the AI safety front, in October Synthesia conducted a public red team test for risks around online harms, which demonstrated how the firm’s compliance controls counter attempts to create non-consensual deepfakes of people or use its avatars to encourage suicide, adult content or gambling.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology test was led by Rumman Chowdhury, a renowned data scientist who was formerly head of AI ethics at Twitter — before it became known as X under Elon Musk.

Riparbelli said that Synthesia is seeing increased interest from large enterprise customers, particularly in the U.S., thanks to its focus on security and compliance.

More than half of Synthesia’s annual revenue now comes from customers in the U.S., while Europe accounts for almost half.

Synthesia has also been ramping up hiring. The company recently tapped former Amazon executive Peter Hill as its chief technology officer. The company now employs over 400 people globally.

Synthesia’s announcement follows the unveiling of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s 50-point plan to make the U.K. a global leader in AI.

U.K. Technology Minister Peter Kyle said the investment “showcases the confidence investors have in British tech” and “highlights the global leadership of U.K.-based companies in pioneering generative AI innovations.”

The SEC filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk on Tuesday, alleging the billionaire committed securities fraud in 2022 by failing to disclose his ownership in Twitter and buying shares at “artificially low prices.”

Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, purchased Twitter for $44 billion, later changing the name of the social network to X. Prior to the acquisition he’d built up a position in the company of greater than 5%, which would’ve required disclosing his holding to the public.

According to the SEC complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Musk withheld that material information, “allowing him to underpay by at least $150 million for shares he purchased after his financial beneficial ownership report was due.”

The SEC had been investigating whether Musk, or anyone else working with him, committed securities fraud in 2022 as the Tesla CEO sold shares in his car company and shored up his stake in Twitter ahead of his leveraged buyout. Musk said in a post on X last month that the SEC issued a “settlement demand,” pressuring him to agree to a deal including a fine within 48 hours or “face charges on numerous counts” regarding the purchase of shares.

Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, said in an emailed statement that the action is an admission by the SEC that “they cannot bring an actual case.” He added that Musk “has done nothing wrong” and called the suit a “sham” and the result of a “multi-year campaign of harassment,” culminating in a “single-count ticky tak complaint.”

Musk is just a week away from having a potentially influential role in government, as President-elect Donald Trump’s second term begins on Jan. 20. Musk, who was a major financial backer of Trump in the latter stages of the campaign, is poised to lead an advisory group that will focus in part on reducing regulations, including those that affect Musk’s various companies.

In July, Trump vowed to fire SEC chairman Gary Gensler. After Trump’s election victory, Gensler announced that he would be resigning from his post instead.

In a separate civil lawsuit concerning the Twitter deal, the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System sued Musk, accusing him of deliberately concealing his progressive investments in the social network and intent to buy the company. The pension fund’s attorneys argued that Musk, by failing to clearly disclose his investments, had influenced other shareholders’ decisions and put them at a disadvantage.

The SEC said that Musk crossed the 5% ownership threshold in March 2022 and would have been required to disclose his holdings by March 24.

“On April 4, 2022, eleven days after a report was due, Musk finally publicly disclosed his beneficial ownership in a report with the SEC, disclosing that he had acquired over nine percent of Twitter’s outstanding stock,” the complaint says. “That day, Twitter’s stock price increased more than 27% over its previous day’s closing price.”

The SEC alleges that Musk spent over $500 million purchasing more Twitter shares during the time between the required disclosure and the day of his actual filing. That enabled him to buy stock from the “unsuspecting public at artificially low prices,” the complaint says. He “underpaid” Twitter shareholders by over $150 million during that period, according to the SEC.

In the complaint, the SEC is seeking a jury trial and asks that Musk be forced to “pay disgorgement of his unjust enrichment” as well as a civil penalty.

This story is developing.