Synthesia, a digital media platform that lets users create artificial intelligence-generated videos, has raked in $90 million from investors — including U.S. chip giant Nvidia, the company told HaberTusba exclusively.

The London-based company raised the cash in a funding round led by Accel, an early investor in Facebook, Slack and Spotify. Nvidia came in as a strategic investor, putting in an undisclosed amount of money. Other investors include Kleiner Perkins, GV, FirstMark Capital and MMC. 

Founded in 2017 by researchers and entrepreneurs Victor Riparbelli, Matthias Niessner, Steffen Tjerrild and Lourdes Agapito, Synthesia develops software that allows people to make their own digital avatars to deliver corporate presentations, training videos — or even compliments to colleagues in over 120 different languages.

Its ultimate aim is to eliminate cameras, microphones, actors, lengthy edits, and other costs from the professional video production process. To do that, Synthesia has created animated avatars which look and sound like humans, but are generated by AI. The avatars are based on real-life actors who speak in front of a green screen.

“Productivity can be improved because you are reducing the cost of producing the video to that of making a PowerPoint,” Philippe Botteri, at Accel, the lead investor in Synthesia’s Series C, told HaberTusba, adding that adoption of video has been proliferated by consumer platforms such as YouTube, Netflix and TikTok.

“Video is a much better way to communicate knowledge. When we think about the potential of the company and the valuation, we think about what it can return, [and] in the case of Synthesia, we’re just scratching the surface.”

Synthesia is a form of generative AI, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But the company says it has been working on its own proprietary generative AI for years, and that although ChatGPT may have only recently emerged into public consciousness, generative AI itself isn’t a new technology.

Business Insider previously reported that Synthesia was in talks with investors to raise between $50 million and $75 million in new funds at a valuation of around $1 billion.

The report didn’t include detail about Nvidia’s involvement, nor mention the total $90 million sum raised.

Synthesia is one of many firms attracting interest from investors with AI and enterprise software that can reduce costs involved in certain business processes. Companies are looking to reduce expenses everywhere they can to combat climbing inflation and prepare for a possible recession. 

Last week, French business planning software company Pigment raised $88 million from investors including Iconiq Growth, Felix Capital, Meritech IVP and FirstMark, in part to ramp up its investment in AI.

To address that, Synthesia says it has kept ethics in mind while developing its software. The company requires consent from the people who feature as avatars in its software, and uses a mix of humans and machine learning to target material such as profanity and hate speech.

It is also signed up to Responsible Practices for Synthetic Media, a voluntary industrywide framework for the ethical and responsible development, creation and sharing of synthetic media.

“There are many different discourses going on right now. There’s one about the very long-term existential sort of risk scenarios. I think they’re important to talk about as well. But I’d love to see more focus on where are we today?” Riparbelli told HaberTusba in an interview.

“These technologies are already powerful. How do we deal with hallucinations? How do we deal with all of the problems that arise?” he added. “There’s definitely pitfalls. But there’s also just so much opportunity in it, I think, leveling the playing field and enabling people to do much more with less.”