Rephrase.ai makes new investments to grow its artificial media platform

Rephrase.ai, an independent synthetic media production platform, today announced that it has raised $10.6 million in a Series A round led by Silver Lake and Red Ventures with participation from 8VC. CEO Ashray Malhotra said the plan is to focus the new cash on Rephrase’s engineering, data science, product and business teams to expand headcount.

It was re-founded in 2019 by Malhotra, Shivam Mangala and Nishet Lahoti. Since his early college days, Lahoti wanted to build a “text-to-film” engine that could take a script or storyboard as input and generate a movie, Malhotra told TechCrunch. That was too ambitious, so instead, the Rephrase team created an AI system that creates avatars of human actors by mapping their faces, synchronizing their lip movements, and imitating their voice tones and postures.

“With video being the default, what hinders video creation today is the time and cost of production,” Malhotra said in an email. “That’s the problem that redefinition aims to solve.”

Using Rephrase’s platform, a customer can choose an avatar, background and voice, and enter the text that the avatar will read. You can then export the video for use in marketing tools.

The technology is not particularly new. Startups like Synthesia, Neosapience and Hour One rely on similar AI systems to create custom videos for different use cases. New rivals include China-based Surel, which aims to develop an AI video editing system that can animate not just faces, but costumes and movements. Elsewhere, video and audio-focused firms Respeecher, Papercup, Resemble AI and Deepdub have launched AI dubbing tools for shows and movies. Beyond the basics, Nvidia is developing technology that takes an actor’s facial expression and transforms video into a new language that matches them.

Redefining is strong in pursuing high-profile corporate contracts, but with a client base that includes groups at Johnson & Johnson, Amazon and Castrol. Mondelez India hit the platform to carve out the likeness of Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan, which was used to create personalized advertisements in local stores across India.

“Since we’ve grown our sales team, we’ve focused on building vertical solutions for key industries like fintech, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) and direct-to-consumer. Most of our revenue comes from large enterprises with over 1,000 employees, so this is a big focus for us. It’s direction,” Malhotra said. The growth of re-phrase comes at a time when many industries are looking for automated and scalable video solutions for business functions, especially sales and marketing. The Covid-19 pandemic has slowed down traditional video production. Since creating real video is a tedious process, we are seeing more interest in automated video creation.

Artificial media platforms raise all sorts of thorny ethical questions, of course, what with the emergence of deeply fake and falsified media. But Malhotra points to the company’s usage policy, which prohibits the use of Rephrase-generated avatars based on the content of starred videos. Clients – who must go through an approval process – control the copyright of any synthetic media they create.

“Redesigning the policies and creating a digital avatar is ethically based on the individual consent and individual consent of the person involved,” Malhotra said.

San Francisco-based Rephrase has a team of 35 people and expects to hire about 35 more by the end of the year. To date, the startup has raised $12.5 million; Malhotra claims to have a runway of almost two years.