Dwight Churchill (left) and Gaurav Misra (right) met in 2015 while working at mobile analytics startup Localytics. The two co-founded AI video editing app Captions in 2021.
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Designed for “talking videos”, this video editing software has been used by 3 million creators to date and has a $250 million valuation.
In a short video, a man explains how to make fajitas in a non-fryer. The video is played in his AI-based video editing app Captions, which automatically generates subtitles in bold font. Gaurav Misra, his CEO and co-founder of Captions, then explains how to use the app’s translation tool to dub an entire video into another language, Hindi. Through a series of taps and toggles, we demonstrate the app’s ability to automatically adjust audio volume, background color, remove certain words, and add transitions.
Misra said the demo highlights how his company makes it easier for video creators to reach a wider audience. Additionally, the video editing startup announced Thursday that it has raised a $25 million Series B round led by Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel. The fresh cash injection brings the startup’s valuation to $250 million, bringing the total amount of funding raised to $40 million. Kleiner Perkins is a “bull” in video communications, said Everett Randle, a partner at the company. Randle has previously led funding rounds for AI video startup Synthesia and video recording platform Room. “Mr. Gaurav came to us with a fair valuation of the business that incorporated his traction, profitability and vision while retaining a lot of returns for investors, and we agreed with him.” says Randle.
Captioning has its origins in Misra’s time at Snap Inc., where she led the design engineering team from 2016 to 2021. During this time, he has witnessed the evolution of social media videos, from his TikTok-style dance videos to his Instagram reels to YouTube shorts. He also noticed the rise of new categories. The “talking video,” in which creators talk directly to the camera, was attracting attention. In 2020, Misra left Snap to co-found Captions with his former colleague Dwight Churchill, who left Goldman Sachs.
Since then, about 3 million creators have used the app to automatically caption and edit videos across a wide range of categories, including golf, real estate and aviation, Misra said. The app has about 100,000 daily active his users and about 1 million videos are created on the platform every month.
But it’s not just the market. The New York-based startup is like ByteDance’s CapCut editing app, which reportedly has 200 million active users, and Adobe, which has its own generative AI capabilities under Firefly. against more established companies. In recent years, AI-based video and audio editing startups like Descript have emerged, attracting millions of dollars in VC funding.
Misra says Captions’ tools are designed specifically for editing talking videos, so they approach video editing software differently. “Most video production editing is focused on aesthetics like filters and colors, but we’ve become more focused on communicating ideas and experiences,” said Misra. Forbes.
The app costs $10/month and offers a set of generative AI-based features covering different stages of video production such as recording, editing, and delivery. Most of the features are built on an open source model, but some are built by his 16-person team at Captions, Misra said. Her AI Script Her Writer feature in the app allows creators to use her ChatGPT to script videos and caption the audio using OpenAI’s speech-to-text tool Whisper . We offer an in-house voice cloning tool, trained with licensed voice recordings, that can translate a user’s voice into his 28 other languages, or use AI narration to narrate content from scratch. Misra acknowledged the risk of users using the software to create deepfakes, and to reduce the potential for exploitation, creators could insert or create new audio recordings in imported videos. Instead, it said that you can only change the language of the voice.
Other features allow users to automatically zoom in and out, detect and remove filler and offensive words, and adjust the sound level of background audio in videos. Captions also used his AI eye correction tool, originally developed by Nvidia, to adjust the user’s eyes so that they appear to be looking at the camera. increase.
With the new funding injection, the startup plans to expand its team to develop existing features such as an AI music feature that automatically rearranges pre-recorded instruments to create background instrumental music. Misra said adding more features will make it even easier for content creators to compete on a level playing field with more resource-rich competitors.
“Our goal is to bring these technologies to everyday people,” says Misra. “Half the battle is technology.”
