AIがテキストを動画に変換する技術を開発し、6,000万ドル（約90億円）以上を調達
月商 $8,333,333 · 創業者4人 · 従業員300人 · London, UK
Victor Riparbelli（Founder, Synthesia）· 創業 January 2017 · 記事掲載 — · synthesia.io · 元の記事
著名人のキャンペーン（デビッド・ベッカム、リオネル・メッシ）で認知度を高めた。初期はVCからの資金調達に苦戦し、Mark Cubanからの100万ドル（約1.5億円）の投資が転機に。2023年時点の月商は833万ドル（約12.5億円）、従業員300人（ユーザー提供情報。記事には「$70M超の資金調達」「従業員100人」とある）
売値の出典: 公式サイトの料金ページで確認できず（無料トライアルあり）（2026-10-13 取得）
Just keep at it. Resilience is key.
Victor Riparbelli is the CEO and co-founder of Synthesia. I'm Danish and grew up Copenhagen where I was involved in startups for almost a decade before founding Synthesia. I started out building websites for local businesses in my teenage years and spent years working for various startups including a stint at Founders, a european Venture Studio. Just keep at it. Resilience is key. In 2016 I moved to London to pursue my interest in VR/AR and AI and through my work there I was eventually led to discover the AI video technology that underpins Synthesia. In 2017 I co-founded the company with Prof. Matthias Niessner, Prof. Lourdes Agapito and Steffen Tjerrild.
Synthesia was officially founded in November 2017, but the lead up to that was 8 months of attempting to assemble a team, trying to raise money and maintain our belief in the idea when no one else did. Steffen and I met in Denmark where we worked at the same company for a while. We always knew we had a shared ambition and complementary skillset. The idea for Synthesia cam when I read Matthias' research paper, Face2Face which is now a seminal paper in the synthetic media space. It even got Matthias invited to Jimmy Kimmel. I sensed that this technology would be a paradigm shift in content creation and pitched it to Steffen who at the time lived in Africa. He was in and moved to London a few months after. Next, we had to get the technical talent that could build the technology. At that point Matthias Niessner had many requests to start a company around the technology but wasn't convinced as most of the ideas he was pitched revolved around creating fun 'Snapchat-filter' style consumer apps. To make a long story short it took many months to convince Matthias and later Lourdes Agapito to co-found the company. As two 26 year olds it was difficult to convince two of the worlds leading computer vision professors to say the least. But ultimately we all shared the same sentiment: this technology will change the world and we had a shared vision for how we could build the leading company in this space. We also convinced Jon Starck, who at the time was Head of Research at Foundry, one of the leading visual effects software comapnies, to join us. Then the hard part began. Builiding 'deep tech' is different from more traditional software companies. You spend years building the core technology. The development cycles are long and uncertain; when you are doing actual blue-sky research you can spend months on a solution that might never work at all. It took us almost three years to build the first iteration of the platform product as it exists today. In 2017 the world mainly saw negative coverage of deepfake technology. Where others saw a media apocalypse I saw opportunity – most new technology is met with fear and dismissal until it becomes part of everyday life. With no product or revenue to show investors weren't exactly all over us in the early days. The first 7 months of the company we funded with our Bitcoin profits until it got to the point where we were almost out out money. We tried to to raise money but VC's couldn't personally emphasise with the problem (few VCs produce video) and generally thought it was a cool but not commercially interesting idea. Coupled with the media narrative it was a hard sell. We got turned down by 73 funds before we managed to close our pre-seed round. As part of our fundraising process we had a list of high net-worth individuals who had an interest in both media and technology. Mark Cuban was on that list, but we had no idea how we'd get in touch with him. Steffen started googling around and discovered that Sony had recently been hacked and a lot of emails had been leaked. We downloaded the data, found Mark's email and reached out to him. I had just launched the web page for Synthesia. Mark Cuban was the signup we had. I thought that Steffen was pulling a joke on me, but he insisted that it wasn't him. A few minutes later an email from Mark popped into Steffens inbox and we were flabbergasted. After 16 hours of back-and-forth emailing with Cuban and his team, Mark decided to invest $1 million (at 4am UK time). And that became the beginning of Synthesia. Since then we continued to build out the technology, eventually building an actual product and taking the technology to market. Today we've raised more than $70M in funding and we will soon be 100 people. As a founder it's a surreal feeling having gone from nothing to a real company. I'm grateful for all the support we've had from friends, family and good-hearted people that enabled us to persist through the early days of the company which were a very dark and uncertain period in our lives.
We've generated more than 12,000,000 videos today and work with thousand of customers all over the world. and raised $76.6M in venture capital from the world's best investors. Over the years we've created multiple celebrity campaigns that have been really successful. That has both been fun to be involved in and has made a real impact for the company and the industry in general: Beckham campaign, Messi campaign. Now, we're evolving our product to become a fully-fledged video platform to help our customers make even more, and better video. Next gen of our AI technology will soon be released which will be a major upgrade to the realism of the videos we generate.
I've learned loads – one of the key things I'd underline is that you literally can force something into existence if you push hard enough. We all think that the world around us is built by people who are much smarter and more influential than us. But in reality it is those who dare to take the risk and enter the arena who builds the world around us. And the arena is free for anyone to enter. I also learnt that truly succesfull people have a lot of respect for people who build more than they talk. And counterintuitively, the more crazy an idea the more they want to help. We've had so many amazing people help us on our journey without expecting anything in return. I try to pass that on as much as I can.
If I had to pick one business book I'd be Zero to One by Peter Thiel. I love sci-fi and one of my favorites is Forty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne. I read it many times in my childhood and to me it perfectly combines the magic of technology and science with storytelling. For podcasts I'd go with Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy.
Just keep at it. Resilience is key.
We are hiring across all departments - R&D, product, sales, growth, design, and creative. You can see all open positions here.
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