AI video editing startup Captions announced on July 9, 2024 that it had raised $60 million in a Series C funding round, bringing the total amount raised to date to $100 million. The company's valuation is also said to be $500 million.
The lead investor is Index Ventures, which also invested in DeepL's most recent funding round, which raised $300 million and valued the company at $2 billion.
In a tweet announcing the news, Captions thanked returning investors Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital, as well as new investors Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and actor Jared Leto.
Captions says that over the past year, the company's team has grown from 15 to 60 people in its New York headquarters, its customers produce more than 3 million videos each month, and the app now has more than 10 million creators around the world.
The Captions platform enables users to create, edit and distribute videos, specifically lowering the barrier of entry for non-professional users. The app is available in desktop, web and mobile formats and has two pricing tiers: Pro and Max.
The startup's specialty is videos of people talking. Users can enter text and a photorealistic avatar will speak it. Users can also just suggest a topic and the software will create a script for it. In this respect, Captions competes directly with UK-based Synthesia, which raised $90 million in Series C at a unicorn valuation in mid-2023 and is using the funds to fund a complete relaunch of its platform, announced in June 2024.
Slator 2024 Language Industry Market Report — Language AI Edition
The 140-page flagship report includes in-depth market analysis, the Language AI opportunity, and research findings.
Captions offers subtitle and voice-over translation in 28 languages, using AI to make the translated audio closer to the original. Among the languages supported is Hinglish, a Hindi-English blend popular among young people in India, highlighting the growing importance of the Indian creator scene.
Captions openly integrates other large-scale language models (LLMs) into its workflow: OpenAI and Anthropic are used for text generation, for example, while software from voice cloning startup ElevenLabs helps bring the voices to life.
Co-founders Gaurav Misra and Dwight Churchill founded Captions in 2021. Misra, the current CEO, served as head of design engineering at Snap, the technology company formerly known as Snapchat, for five years and was a software development engineer at Microsoft during the launch of Azure.
Captions' COO, Churchill, is also a developer, having previously worked at Goldman Sachs and more recently at Klaviyo.
While many of the notable investors in this funding round are based in Silicon Valley, Captions has made it public that it intends to remain in New York.
“Looking to the future, I'm pleased to announce plans to invest $100 million to advance generative video research here in New York City,” Misra wrote in a blog post. “We believe New York is emerging as a hub for AI research, and we look forward to building a world-class team here.”
At the time of publishing, Captions is currently hiring two product designers, seven software engineers, two performance marketers, and two “technical sourcers,” as well as an applied scientist, an Android engineer, and a machine learning scientist.
