British startup Synthesia, whose AI platform helps businesses create interactive training videos, has raised $200 million in Series E funding that takes its valuation to $4 billion, up from $2.1 billion just a year ago.
Unlike other AI startups that are still far from generating profits, Synthesia has found a lucrative business in turning training into a business using AI-generated avatars. With corporate clients including Bosch, Merck and SAP, the London-based company has gone through $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in April 2025.
This milestone explains why Synthesia’s backers are literally doubling down. The Series E, which nearly doubled its valuation, was led by existing investor GV (Google Ventures), with participation from several other previous backers, including Kleiner Perkins Series B Lead, Accel C Series Lead, Series D, Responsible for New Enterprise Associates (NEA), NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIAAir Street Capital and PSP Croissance.
In addition to continued support, this round will attract both new and exiting investors. On the one hand, Evantic, Matt Miller’s venture capital firm and the secret venture capital firm Hedosophia join the cap table as new entrants. On the other hand, Synthesia will facilitate a secondary sale for employees in partnership with Nasdaq, TechCrunch has learned.
To be clear, Synthesia has not yet gone public – Nasdaq is not acting as a public exchange in this transaction, but as a private markets facilitator that will help early team members turn their shares into cash. These sales of shares to employees often take place outside this framework, but generally at prices lower or higher than the official valuation of the company, and are sometimes frowned upon by other shareholders. With this process, all sales will be tied to the same $4 billion valuation as Synthesia’s Series E, while the company retains an element of control.
“This secondary concerns our employees first and foremost,” Synthesia CFO Daniel Kim told TechCrunch. “This gives employees a meaningful opportunity to access liquidity and share in the value they helped create, while continuing to operate as a private company focused on long-term growth.”
For Synthesia, this long-term growth means going beyond expressive videos and kissing the trend of AI agents. According to a press release, the company is developing AI agents that will allow its clients’ employees “to interact with company knowledge in a more intuitive and human way by asking questions, exploring scenarios through role-playing, and receiving personalized explanations.”
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The company said initial pilots received positive feedback from customers, who reported higher engagement and faster knowledge transfer compared to traditional formats. This positive response explains why Synthesia now plans to make agents a “core strategic focus” to invest in, alongside further product enhancements to its existing platform.
Although it hasn’t disclosed its revenue forecast, the company hopes its platform will offer a welcome answer to companies’ struggles to keep their workforce properly trained despite rapid change. “We are seeing a rare convergence of two major shifts: a technological shift with increasingly capable AI agents, and a market shift where upskilling and internal knowledge sharing have become board-level priorities,” Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, said in a statement.
Seeing boards care more about employees thanks to AI wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card, except perhaps Riparbelli. With his co-founder, Steffen Tjerrild, COO of Synthesia, Riparbelli took the initiative to carry out a secondary sale so that employees could share in the success of the unicorn company. Founded in 2017, Synthesia now has more than 500 team members, a 20,000 sq ft head office in Londonand additional offices in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Munich, New York and Zurich.
Although unusual for a British startup, this coordinated secondary sale is not a first and probably not the last, Alexandru Voica, Synthesia’s head of business and corporate policy, told TechCrunch. “I guess like [U.K.-based] private companies stay private longer, this type of structured, cross-border liquidity for employees could become increasingly common, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see others do it, whether with Nasdaq or others,” he predicted.
