Captions raises Series C to invest $100 million in AI video research

Captions, the generative video creation and editing platform, announced it has raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Index Ventures, bringing the total capital raised to $100 million for a valuation of $500 million. Returning investors include Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital, while new investors include Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and actor/musician Jared Leto. The company plans to use this funding to grow their machine learning team and invest further into in-house research efforts and technical infrastructure, positioning Captions to continue pioneering breakthroughs for video technology.

“We’re excited to share our plan to invest $100 million into advancing generative video research from New York City,” said Gaurav Misra, co-founder and CEO of Captions. “We believe New York is quickly emerging as the epicenter for AI, and look forward to expanding our team here and furthering our mission of democratizing video creation, so that anyone can effectively share their stories or ideas. We’re grateful for the continued support from our investors and community, and excited for our next chapter.”

In recent months, the company has launched proprietary generative technology including AI Creator, the first-of-its-kind 3D avatar designed for content creation, AI Edit, a tool that offers the ability to fully edit a video with one tap, and Lipdub, a model that generates natural lip movement and body language. These features have led to exceptional growth for Captions over the past year – leading to more than 10 million downloads for mobile alone.

“Storytelling is humanity’s most powerful trait. Captions is enabling a higher dimension of storytelling via their AI-enabled video creation product. The company allows anyone to bring their stories to life in ways that were previously unimaginable and to truly share them with the whole world. The result will be a huge wave of incredible stories that are imagined and directed by Captions users,” said Damir Becirovic, Partner at Index Ventures.

“We’re thrilled to continue supporting Captions, especially as we’ve witnessed the company achieve one major milestone after another in such a short period of time,” added Everett Randle, Partner at Kleiner Perkins. “Captions’ ability to ship widely-adopted, innovative products quickly has become a defining characteristic for their team and we look forward to continuing to partner with them.”

To date, Captions has offered a suite of recording and editing tools dedicated to enhancing “talking videos” – videos where the creator addresses the camera directly. With the most recent launch of AI Creator, Captions has expanded from letting users record and edit talking videos to generating them entirely. AI Creator is already being featured in content ranging from organic social posts to ads for small and established businesses.

“Short-form video has become the most dominant content format, and Captions is uniquely positioned to transform how marketers create videos and engage with customers,” says Brandon Greer, Head of HubSpot Ventures. “We’re excited to support Captions as they enable businesses of all sizes to produce high-quality video content faster than ever.”