Rephrase.ai, a synthetic media production platform, raised USD 1.5 million in seed funding, led by LightSpeed Ventures and AV8 Ventures. Rephrase.ai, born out of Techstars 2019, intends to use the capital to scale up the AI-powered video personalization platform, expand its engineering and research teams, as well as strengthen its commercial presence in North America.
For Rephrase.ai, creating a personalized video is as simple as writing a text mail. The company’s generative AI platform allows brand ambassadors to individually address each customer with video content that creates trust and loyalty on a scale. Sans the production cost and manual effort in a studio, the Rephrase.ai engine can create millions of personalized videos. With traditional video production methods, this level of personalization is impossible.
Facial reenactment and lip synchronization technologies predicting lip movements, facial expressions, and head movements are the primary principles of the AI video platform. Rephrase.ai has helped in solving a problem as fundamental as automating the video shoot process itself.
The company has already marked an increasing demand from B2B SaaS enterprises and digital marketing agencies for creating video content of sales and marketing across multiple industries, including e-commerce, entertainment, automotive, real estate, and financial services.
“Our goal at Rephrase.ai is to reimagine how we communicate to better match our visual culture,” said Ashray Malhotra, CEO of Rephrase.ai. “Now, enterprises can create high-quality video content for targeted sales and marketing initiatives while saving time and money. This technology will change the way we think about video production, both for business communication today and filmmaking in the future.”
The pandemic has brought a pause on traditional video production and has made in-person meetings difficult. At such times, where many industries are looking for automated and scalable video solutions, especially in sales and marketing, Rephrase.ai has come up with an innovative idea.
Synthetic media is an emerging industry, especially in the current situation. It not only solves the pain point of reduced face-to-face interactions and limited production shooting opportunities, but it also addresses a larger social trend, i.e., instead of reading, people prefer to watch content. Ultimately, Rephrase.ai will reveal a new era of creativity by allowing to create high-quality videos, and, eventually, films by eliminating the prohibitive time and cost obligations of traditional productions by leveling the playing field.
“Personalization is a huge lever to unlock ROI, especially in sales and marketing where a white-glove personalized experience really makes a difference in engagement and outcomes,” said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed India Partners. “We are already seeing companies run video-based marketing campaigns that see click-through rates of 4x over other personalized emails, but these videos are recorded individually, are expensive and unscalable. Rephrase.ai’s platform allows companies to create millions of personalized videos using real models with just text as input,” he continued. “The Rephrase.ai team is one of the most technically and creatively savvy teams out there with prior experiences at Google, Facebook, Samsung, and MIT media labs, and we are very excited to go on this ambitious journey with them!”
