Synthesia has hit $100m in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and has raised investment from Adobe ahead of a planned push into the AI agent market later this year.
The UK-based startup — which uses generative AI to create realistic avatars of people for marketing videos and communications — announced it had reached the revenue milestone and received fresh funding on Tuesday, three months on from a $180m Series D.
Synthesia’s agentic tool will allow customers to make AI videos interactive and is earmarked for release in the first half of this year, founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli tells Sifted.
Huge buzz has been created around AI agent technology in recent times, with investors clamouring to funnel cash into companies building those tools.
European startups in the sector have raised €1bn a third of the way into 2025, according to Sifted data, tracking ahead of the €1.7bn picked up across the whole of last year.
The size of Adobe’s investment and Synthesia’s current valuation remain undisclosed.
The London-based startup’s Series D was led by US-based venture firm NEA and featured participation from existing investors including Google Ventures and MMC Ventures, and saw it hit a $2.1bn valuation.
AI agent play
Founded in 2017, Synthesia has been building its GenAI-powered video platform for enterprises since before ChatGPT-triggered the AI boom. It says it has 65k customers including more than 70% of the Fortune 100.
While Synthesia has built its own AI video models, it’s also using others from Big Tech giants, including Google Deepmind’s Veo — a growing business model among startups looking to leverage best-in-class tech.
Others building applications on top of AI models from other providers include the likes of London and US-based AI voice startup ElevenLabs and US-based AI dev tool Cursor.
Around 50% of Synthesia’s revenue comes from the US, with the rest from Europe and Asia, Riparbelli says.
He tells Sifted the company has “captured” the AI avatar for enterprises category, and is now looking to expand into different product lines.
The next on the roadmap will be an AI agent that allows real time video interaction.
“We believe the future of communication is not going to be just static videos you watch,” Riparbelli says. “It’s going to be videos that have an interactive component to them.”
A customer-facing sales video could be asked questions by that customer as they watch it or an onboarding video for a new employee could quiz that person on what they’ve learnt, he tells Sifted.
Riparbelli hopes the release of that product could help Synthesia grow its ARR by 100% by this time next year.
In the meantime, it’s got to navigate an increasingly choppy economic outlook.
US president Donald Trump’s tariffs have caused recent stock market jitters, which the Synthesia founder says have the potential to impact customer spending power.
Trump’s tariffs raised alarm bells among many in European tech when they were announced earlier this month, with some pointing to the impact market uncertainty can wreak on sentiment among buyers.
“A lot will depend on what happens in the next month or two, both in terms of the policies that the Trump administration decides to act on and how the markets react to that,” says Riparbelli.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/synthesia-100m-arr-ai-agents/
