Rephrase.ai is a synthetic media production platform that creates avatars by mapping faces, synchronizing lip movements, and mimicking voice tone to generate videos from text. Customers select an avatar, background and voice, enter text, and export the resulting videos for use in sales and marketing tools. Founded in 2019 and based in San Francisco, the company has a team of 35 and expects to hire roughly 35 more by the end of the year. The new capital will be used to expand headcount with a focus on engineering, data science, product and business teams, and to build vertical solutions for industries like fintech, BFSI and direct-to-consumer. Rephrase pursues enterprise contracts and counts customers including Johnson & Johnson, Amazon, Castrol and Mondelez India (which used an avatar of Shah Rukh Khan for personalized in-store ads). The startup has raised $12.5 million to date and management reports roughly two years of runway. Rephrase.ai builds synthetic-media technology that its founders envision could one day take any script and create a professional movie without filming. In the near term the company is commercializing an engine for personalized sales videos where users select a model, background and voice and enter text the model will recite. The team spent roughly 18 months developing a method that can use about 10 minutes of footage to predict lip movements for arbitrary phrases. The platform includes safeguards to limit deceptive deepfakes: presenters control who can authorize videos of their faces, access is restricted to authorized businesses, and videos are generated from scratch rather than by transferring faces. Rephrase.ai participated in Techstars Bangalore in 2019 and is currently in early-stage discussions with potential customers. It recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding and is exploring expansions into chatbots and education.

Total raised

$12M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Sep 2022