UK video technology start-up Synthesia has become a global software company, with annual turnover set to exceed $100mn, by looking at its business model through a wider lens.
The London-based company, which has developed an online platform that enables businesses to turn text into professional-grade videos using artificial intelligence, originally targeted the video production departments of entertainment and advertising companies with an AI dubbing product.
For two years after it was founded in 2017, the company employed just 10 people and was struggling to make any sales. But it dawned on management that its lack of growth might have been because its product was relatively niche.
The company’s original focus was “too narrow”, says Daniel Verten, Synthesia’s head of strategy, adding that AI dubbing only provided a solution for a “narrow step within the larger value chain of studio productions”.
As Verten and his team continued to network with potential customers, it became clear there was an even bigger opportunity for an AI platform that could help companies of all industries and sizes create high-quality videos quickly and easily.
That is when the company knew it had to change. “Instead of targeting a handful of entertainment studios, we began empowering everyone from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to transform text-based content such as employee training PDFs or customer support documentation into engaging videos — all generated in house, in minutes, using AI,” Verten says.
In the process, Verten says the company has not just tapped into a larger market but has created an entirely new one by “making video creation fast, affordable and accessible to anyone, not just professional video creators”.
This year, following a $180mn funding round that valued it at $2bn, the company has concluded another significant pivot by “evolving from video generation to interactive video experiences” through the rollout of the third iteration of its platform, explains Verten.
Called Synthesia 3.0, it aims to make videos more interactive through features such as in-video quizzes, clickable “calls to action” in videos, and AI agents that capture participants’ facial expressions and body movements.
These reinvention efforts have proved fruitful. By April 2025, the company’s annual recurring revenue — a prediction of how much a business will earn during the course of a year from subscriptions — had reached $100mn. Also in the past 12 months, the number of customers spending more than $100,000 in the first year of their contracts quadrupled, Verten says.
The net revenue retention rate — a measure of how successful a company is at increasing spending from existing customers — is 140 per cent, which Verten says shows the company is not just maintaining its customer base but also “growing revenue from them through upsells and cross-sells”.
The company’s accounts show that revenues rose 82 per cent to $58mn in 2024 compared with a year earlier, while pre-tax losses more than doubled to $59mn as its spending grew sharply. Corporate affairs chief Alexandru Voica attributes this to “spending more intentionally” on new product developments, such as video agents, and customer acquisition efforts.
He adds that “90 per cent of the Fortune 100 now use Synthesia to create training, support and corporate communications videos”. The company says its customers include global news publisher Reuters, videoconferencing platform Zoom, software group SAP, brewer Heineken and financial research company Moody’s.
Synthesia experienced myriad challenges as it tried to reinvent itself. Evolving from a niche platform to one aimed at all kinds of enterprise-use cases then scaling it presented significant “technical and operational complexity”, says Verten.
On the technical front, the company responded by building an internal IT infrastructure and product capable of creating “thousands of videos per day for large enterprises”. Operationally, the company took steps to improve team-wide communication and ensure employees were working towards a “common” goal to avoid “growing the organisation [too] fast”.
As with many AI companies, Synthesia also experienced challenges around user safety and trust. With AI models heavily reliant on user data and the potential for biased outputs if the underlying datasets are not representative of people of diverse backgrounds, Voica explains that customers “demanded” the company prove its technology was “secure, transparent and auditable”. Verten says the company responded by implementing robust cyber security, governance, and moderation policies and mechanisms.
Synthesia has previously faced criticism from actors’ union Equity when some of its AI-generated avatars were used in 2023 to spread political propaganda in support of the Chinese and Venezuelan governments. Synthesia has since banned these clients from its platform and put in place stricter content-moderation practices.
Verten says some of the lessons he and his colleagues have learnt about successfully pivoting a company include focusing on solving real business problems as opposed to “chasing hype”.
He also says technology companies must “build trust from day one” through strong cyber security, data privacy and safety measures. Finally, he urges any business looking to reinvent itself to focus on “one clear use case” instead of trying to do everything at once.
“Reinvention only works when technology, market focus and operations evolve together,” he says. “We shifted to SaaS [‘software as a service’, a subscription model], built a web-based platform and [in terms of customers] doubled down on large enterprises.”
Synthesia’s reinvention is not over, however. Verten says the company plans to focus on improving the intelligence, collaboration and personalisation capabilities of its platform. It intends to do so by developing AI video agents that “access company knowledge and respond in real time”, that can be used seamlessly by different teams within companies and that “adapt to each viewer’s role, language and context”, he adds.
“We see a future where video becomes not just a communication medium, but an interface between people and information — with ongoing learning, updating and improving,” he concludes. “Our job is to keep pushing that frontier.”
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