Nvidia-Backed AI Startup Synthesia Raises Funding at $4 Billion Valuation

By Mauro Orru

Artificial-intelligence company Synthesia raised $200 million at a $4 billion valuation, adding fresh capital to develop software that businesses can use to train employees through interactive videos.

The Series E funding round included existing backers such as NVentures, Nvidia's venture capital arm, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, New Enterprise Associates, PSP Growth and Air Street Capital. Google Ventures led the round, which also included Hedosophia and Evantic--the venture fund established by former Sequoia investor Matt Miller.

Founded in 2017 by a team of AI researchers and entrepreneurs from colleges including Stanford and Cambridge, London-based Synthesia specializes in text-to-video generation. The company offers a free version of its models with a limit of 10 minutes of video per month, but it also sells fixed monthly subscriptions and enterprise packages at custom prices for those who want to create videos with fewer or no restrictions.

Synthesia said it would deploy the freshly raised capital to develop software where AI agents, or interactive avatars on video, can answer questions from employees who are receiving company training, allowing them to explore scenarios through role-play and get personalized explanations instead of passively consuming company slides.

"Market opportunities like this do not come along often," Synthesia Co-Founder and Chief Executive Victor Riparbelli said. "We are at a unique point in time where technology enables agents that can truly understand and respond, and where enterprises are under unprecedented pressure to reskill and upskill their workforce."

The funding round shows that investors continue to see promise in niche AI startups despite fears that high spending in the sector is creating a market bubble waiting to burst.

A Synthesia spokesman said the company signed Microsoft as a customer toward the end of 2025 and that the startup quadrupled contracts of more than $100,000 in value over the past 12 months, putting it on track to reach $200 million in annual recurring revenue this year.

Synthesia's Series E round comes months after Nscale Global Holdings, a U.K.-based startup that owns data centers that provide the networking, storage and computing needed to power AI, closed a $1.1 billion funding round.

Still, despite billions of dollars in commitments, valuations of AI startups in Europe continue to lag behind U.S. peers. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, plans to raise $10 billion at a valuation of $350 billion before the new investment, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is aiming to raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation of $750 billion before the new investment, the Journal has reported.

News Corp, owner of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 26, 2026 04:14 ET (09:14 GMT)