Synthesia (company)

Synthesia is a synthetic media generation company that develops software used to create AI generated video content. It is based in London, England.

Overview
Synthesia is most often used by corporations for communication, orientation, and training videos. It has been used in advertising campaigns, reporting, product demonstrations, and to create chatbots. The company counts among its users businesses including Amazon, Tiffany & Co. and IHG Hotels & Resorts.

Synthesia's software algorithm mimics speech and facial movements based on video recordings of an individual’s speech and phoneme pronunciation. From this a text-to-speech video is created to look and sound like the individual.

Users create content via the platform's pre-generated AI presenters or by creating digital representations of themselves, called artificial reality identities (ARI), using the platform's AI generation tool. These avatars can be used to narrate videos generated from text. As of August 2021, Synthesia's voice database included multiple gender options in over sixty languages.

The platform constrains its software to be used to recreate celebrities or political figures for satirical purposes. Explicit consent must be provided in addition to a strict pre-screening regimen for use of an individual’s likeness to avoid “deepfaking”.

History
Synthesia's software utilizes deep learning architecture developed by Lourdes Agapito and Matthias Niessner. The company was co-founded in 2017 by Agapito, Niessner, Victor Riparbelli, and Steffen Tjerrild. In 2018, the company first demonstrated the software’s capabilities on the BBC programme Click when it presented a digitization of Matthew Amroliwala speaking Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi.

Synthesia raised $3.1 million in seed funding in 2019. In April 2021, the company raised $12.5 million in Series A funding. In December 2021, it raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and GV. As part of a Series C funding round in June 2023, Synthesia raised an additional $90 million from the likes of US fund Accel and Nvidia, granting the company a total valuation of $1 billion (thus making it a unicorn).

In 2021, Synthesia partnered with Lay's to create the Messi Messages campaign featuring Argentine footballer Lionel Messi. Users created personalized messages with Synthesia's software and sent custom artificial reality video messages from Messi based on their text input. The campaign received a Cannes Lion Award.

In a Freedom House report on October 2023, it was discovered that Synthesia tools were used by the governments of Venezuela and China to create videos of fake TV news outlets using AI-generated avatars to spread propaganda.