LONDON — Synthesia, a video platform that uses artificial intelligence to generate multilingual human avatar montages, has raised $180 million in an investment round that values ​​the startup at $2.1 billion.

That’s more than double the value of Synthesia’s last funding round of $1 billion in 2023.

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

National Energy Administration Statistics Uber Its portfolio companies include TikTok parent ByteDance. Synthesia is also backed by chip giants NVIDIA.

Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli told CNBC that investors view the businesses differently than other companies in the space due to the company’s focus on “utility.”

“Certainly the hype cycle works in our favor,” Ripal Bailey said in an interview. “What’s important to us is building a really good business.”

Riparbelli added that unlike companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral, Synthesia is not “reliant” on venture capital.

These startups have raised billions of dollars at eye-popping valuations while also spending vast sums to train and develop their underlying AI models.

Synthesia isn’t the only startup using artificial intelligence to shake up the world of video production. Other startups offer solutions for producing and editing video content using artificial intelligence, such as Veed.io and runway.

Meanwhile, companies such as OpenAI and Adobe have developed generative AI tools for video creation.

Eric Liaw, a London-based partner at venture capital firm IVP, told CNBC that companies in the artificial intelligence application layer have not been as enthusiastically pursued by investors as companies in the infrastructure layer.

“The amount of capital that application layer companies need to raise is not huge, so the valuations aren’t necessarily as eye-popping as a company like Nvidia,” Liaw told CNBC last month.

Ripal Bailey said the money raised in the latest round will be used to invest in “more of the same,” further advance product development and invest more in security and compliance.

Last year, Synthesia made a series of updates to its platform, including generating AI avatars using laptop webcams or phones, full-body avatars with arms and hands, and screen recording tools where AI avatars guide users through what they want. Watching.

On AI safety, Synthesia conducted a Public red team testing Targeting the risk of online harm, this demonstrates how the company’s compliance controls can counter attempts by non-consenting people to deepfakes or use their avatars to encourage suicide, adult content or gambling.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology testing was led by Rumman Chowdhury, a renowned data scientist and former head of AI ethics at Twitter, which later became known as X Elon Musk.

Riparbelli said there is growing interest in Synthesia from large enterprise customers, especially in the United States, due to its focus on security and compliance.

Synthesia now gets more than half of its annual revenue from U.S. customers, with Europe accounting for nearly half.

Synthesia has also been ramping up its hiring efforts. The company recently named former Amazon executive Peter Hill as chief technology officer. The company currently has more than 400 employees worldwide.

Synthesia’s announcement follows an unveiling by Prime Minister Keir Starmer. A 50-point plan to make the UK a global leader in artificial intelligence.

UK Technology Secretary Peter Keir said the investment “demonstrates investor confidence in UK technology” and “highlights the global leadership of British companies in pioneering generative AI innovation”.