Captions Raises Series C to Invest $100M in Pioneering AI Video Research in New York City
July 09 2024 - 9:30AM
Business Wire
Funding was Led by Index Ventures with
Participation from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia
Capital, Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and Jared Leto
Captions, the leading generative video creation and editing
platform, today announced it has raised $60 million in Series C
funding led by Index Ventures, bringing the total capital raised to
$100 million for a valuation of $500 million. Returning investors
include Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital,
while new investors include Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and
Jared Leto. The company plans to use this funding to grow their
world-class machine learning team and invest further into in-house
research efforts and technical infrastructure, positioning Captions
to continue pioneering breakthroughs for video technology.
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Captions' co-founders CEO Gaurav Misra
(left) and COO Dwight Churchill (right) (Photo: Business Wire)
“We’re excited to share our plan to invest $100M into advancing
generative video research from New York City,” said Gaurav Misra,
co-founder and CEO of Captions. “We believe that New York is
quickly emerging as the epicenter for AI, and look forward to
expanding our team here and furthering our mission of democratizing
video creation, so that anyone can effectively share their stories
or ideas. We’re grateful for the continued support from our
investors and community, and excited for our next chapter.”
In recent months, the company has launched proprietary
generative technology including AI Creator, the first-of-its-kind
3D avatar designed for content creation, AI Edit, a tool that
offers the ability to fully edit a video with one tap, and Lipdub,
a groundbreaking model that generates natural lip movement and body
language. These features, to name just a few, have led to
exceptional growth for Captions over the past year – leading to
more than 10 million downloads for mobile alone.
“Storytelling is humanity's most powerful trait. Captions is
enabling a higher dimension of storytelling via their AI-enabled
video creation product. The company allows anyone to bring their
stories to life in ways that were previously unimaginable and to
truly share them with the whole world. The result will be a huge
wave of incredible stories that are imagined and directed by
Captions users,” said Damir Becirovic, Partner at Index
Ventures.
“We’re thrilled to continue supporting Captions, especially as
we’ve witnessed the company achieve one major milestone after
another in such a short period of time. Captions’ ability to ship
widely-adopted, innovative products quickly has become a defining
characteristic for their team and we look forward to continuing to
partner with them,” added Everett Randle, Partner at Kleiner
Perkins.
To date, Captions has offered a suite of recording and editing
tools dedicated to enhancing “talking videos” – videos where the
creator addresses the camera directly. With the most recent launch
of AI Creator, Captions has expanded from letting users record and
edit talking videos to generating them entirely. AI Creator is
already being featured in content ranging from organic social posts
to ads for small and established businesses.
“Short-form video has become the most dominant content format,
and Captions is uniquely positioned to transform how marketers
create videos and engage with customers,” says Brandon Greer, Head
of HubSpot Ventures. “We're excited to support Captions as they
enable businesses of all sizes to produce high-quality video
content faster than ever.”
For more information about Captions, visit www.captions.ai or
try Captions on iOS or web.
About Captions Captions is a revolutionary creative
studio that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to
transform the video creation process, enabling users to
effortlessly produce studio-grade videos with just a few taps. By
empowering every creator to effectively share their stories and
ideas, Captions aims to foster a more inclusive and diverse online
community. Evolving into a comprehensive suite of tools, this
full-stack subscription offers avatars, editing, captioning,
dubbing, and audio correction, streamlining the entire creative
process.
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