Latest news with #Synthesia
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Eight months in, Swedish unicorn Lovable crosses the $100M ARR milestone
Less than a week after it became Europe's latest unicorn, Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable is now also a centaur — a company with more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Lovable took only eight months since its launch to get here, thanks to the skyrocketing popularity of its AI-powered website and app builder. The startup claims it now has more than 2.3 million active users, and last reported 180,000 paying subscribers. With only 45 full-time employees, and 14 open positions on its careers page, that makes for an impressive employee-to-revenue ratio. Subscriptions seem to be driving the bulk of Lovable's revenue, but the company isn't prioritizing sales at all costs. Shortly after Lovable said it had reached ARR of $75 million in June, its CEO Anton Osika wrote on X that Lovable had 'lost $1.5 million ARR in a single day' because it had moved all users on its Team tier to its less expensive Pro tier, which now also accommodates collaboration. The Teams plan is now being replaced by a Business tier, which sits between the Pro and custom Enterprise offerings. The new plan offers business-focused features such as self-serve, Single Sign-On (SSO), templates, private projects that won't be visible to the entire team, and the option to opt-out from having your data be used for training. Lovable already has a slate of large customers like Klarna, Hubspot and Photoroom, but there are still notable barriers and concerns around vibe coding among enterprises — where the big money is. This new tier could help Lovable find intermediary use cases and drive more businesses to use its tools for more than prototyping, which is what the startup says most people use it for today. This has been one focus for the company, and Osika recently said that businesses were driving significant revenue from projects built with Lovable. The startup says more than 10 million projects have been created on Lovable to date. The $100 million ARR club isn't large, especially in Europe, but it is growing thanks to tailwinds from all things AI. In April, Nvidia-backed B2B AI video platform Synthesia, also surpassed that milestone — though it was founded in 2017, not late 2024. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
BBC News
14-07-2025
- Business
- BBC News
New AI voice tool trained to copy British regional accents
A new AI voice-cloning tool from a British firm claims to be able to reproduce a range of UK accents more accurately than some of its US and Chinese much of the data traditionally used to train AI products with voices comes from North American or southern English speaking sources, many artificial voices tend to sound combat this, the company Synthesia spent a year compiling its own database of UK voices with regional accents, through recording people in studios and gathering online used those to train a product called Express-Voice, which can clone a real person's voice or generate a synthetic can be used in content such as training videos, sales support and company said its customers wanted more accurate regional representations."If you're the CEO of a company, or if you're just a regular person, when you have your likeness, you want your accent to be preserved," said Synthesia Head of Research Youssef Alami added French-speaking customers had also commented that synthetic French voices tended to sound French-Canadian rather than originating from France."This is just because the companies building these models tend to be North American companies, and they tend to have datasets that are biased towards the demographics that they're in," he hardest accents to mimic are the least common, Mr Mejjati said, because there is less recorded material available to train an AI are also reports that voice-prompted AI products, such as smart speakers, are more likely to struggle to understand a range of year, internal documents from West Midlands Police revealed worries about whether voice recognition systems would understand Brummie the US-based start-up Sanas is taking the opposite approach, developing tools for deployment in call centres which "neutralise" the accents of Indian and Filipino staff, as reported by Bloomberg in March. The firm says it aims to reduce "accent discrimination" experienced by workers when callers fail to understand them. Endangered languages and dialects There is concern that languages and dialects are being lost in the digital era."Among the over seven thousand languages that still exist today, almost half are endangered according to UNESCO; about a third have some online presence; less than 2 percent are supported by Google Translate; and according to OpenAI's own testing, only fifteen, or 0.2 percent are supported by GPT-4 [an OpenAI model] above an 80 percent accuracy," writes Karen Hao in the book Empire of AI."Language models are homogenising speech," agrees AI expert Henry Ajder, who advises governments and tech firms, including the better these products become, the more effective they will also be in the hands of product will not be free when it is released in the coming weeks, and will have guardrails around hate speech and explicit there are already many free, open-source voice-cloning tools which are easily accessible and less the beginning of July, messages generated by an AI-cloned voice impersonating US Secretary of State Marco Rubio were reported to have been sent to ministers."The open source landscape for voice has evolved so rapidly over the last nine to 12 months," Mr Ajder adds."And that, from a safety perspective, is a real concern." Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the world's top tech stories and trends. Outside the UK? Sign up here.
CNBC
14-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Recruiter: I interviewed serial moonlighter Soham Parekh — here are my top 3 takeaways
When one recruiter received Silicon Valley's notorious serial moonlighter Soham Parekh's job application two years ago, he was immediately impressed. This was two years before the young Mumbai-based engineer was exposed for working remotely at several Silicon Valley startups simultaneously. "I was looking at his resume, and his resume was so good that even my CEO at the time pinged me and was, like, 'Russ, this guy looks awesome. let's talk to this guy,'" Russell Pompea, recruiting manager at AI video startup Topaz Labs, told CNBC Make It. Pompea said Parekh sent his application via the company's career page for a software engineering position on June 2, 2023, and that he decided to interview the young engineer over a phone call on June 12. CNBC Make It verified Parekh's interview with Topaz Labs via screenshots. At the time, Parekh listed AI-video startup Synthesia, as well as a lesser-known AI company, as previous employers on his resume. Pompea said this combination of companies made him a really attractive candidate, so interviewing him was a no-brainer. "I remember him being a very good communicator," Pompea recalled from the initial screening. "That was one of my first notes: 'Soham is a great communicator.' I've talked to 1,000 software engineers or something over the last year, and they're not usually very good at communicating." However, during the interview, Pompea picked up on a few red flags that ultimately stopped him from progressing Parekh to the next round. "I think he learned some lessons from this interview, " Pompea said. In an interview on tech show TBPN on Thursday, Parekh admitted that it was true he was working for multiple startups at once and wasn't proud of what he had done. "No one really likes to work 140 hours a week, but I had to do this out of necessity," Parekh said in the show. "I was in extremely dire financial circumstances." Topaz Labs did not verify whether Parekh worked at the firms mentioned on his resume at the time as he did not progress to this stage of the screening process. When Pompea tried to dig into the details of Parekh's experience in the interview, he identified what he thought were "three major problems" with his responses. "It looked like an amazing profile, even if it was someone who was relatively junior, but then he was missing a fair bit of actual details in the products that he built," Pompea said. When he pressed him about his work for Synthesia, Parekh was vague. "People usually have great command of the details," Pompea noted. Pompea also spotted that the dates between Parekh's experience at Synthesia and overlapped, and he wasn't able to come up with an adequate explanation for why. "He told me that he was working at both full-time and that there was an overlap in his notice period ... I wrote it down, like, this is a big red flag," Pompea said. Parekh's decision to leave Synthesia also didn't make sense to Pompea. The engineer claimed the company was growing too fast and he felt "pigeon-holed," according to Pompea's recollection. "I asked him, 'Did you try going to another team or another function?' And he just totally skirted the question ... you don't usually just leave a top-tier, super high-paying company because you're frustrated. You try to find another job [in the company] first." Topaz Labs requires employees to work on-site at its headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Parekh glossed over details about whether he was going to move to Dallas and said he was in New York at the time, according to Pompea. In early July, two years after Pompea interviewed Parekh, Suhail Doshi, the founder of Playground AI, took to X to warn other startups about the moonlighting engineer who he said is "preying on YC [Y Combinator] companies and more." Several startup founders then came forward about hiring Parekh, saying they fired him after seeing Doshi's post. Parekh said he started moonlighting in this way in 2022, and the grueling lifestyle meant he became a "serial non-sleeper." He added that he "cared about these companies" and "greed wasn't an incentive," despite his financial situation. He said he always took the lower pay, higher equity offer at companies. For Pompea, it was a relief that Topaz Labs did not hire Parekh. "I think I was glad that we were not one of those companies that came out and said that we hired him and had to fire him. I would much rather be somebody who saw through it," he said. "That being said, I actually feel a little bad for a lot of these companies, because these are people working in good faith." Pompea said people like Parekh make the job of a recruiter harder — but also emphasize the importance of vigorous screening. As a hiring manager, Pompea said soft skills like teamwork and collaboration are just as crucial as technical skills — and sometimes fast-moving startups overlook these human qualities. "What I've discovered [while] hiring for Topaz labs for two and a half years, but also lots of other similar companies, is that you almost never have to fire anybody because they can't learn a new software language, or they can't learn a new framework, or if there's some sort of technical problem," he explained. "The people that do end up getting fired have attitude problems, commitment problems, or work rate problems." He said that many of the AI startups that Parekh applied to work at are "moving at 1,000 miles per hour," and need to get products ready for launch within days. As a result, they may delay background checks until after the candidate is hired. "Some of these startups might hire you two days after you do your final interview, and they're like 'Hey, it's Thursday. Can you start Monday?'" Ultimately, Pompea said that if Parekh cleaned up his act, then he'd have a bright future ahead of him. In fact, a number of startups that employed the engineer praised his technical skills, even amid the backlash against him. "I also feel bad for the kid, too, like he's a very smart kid. I hope that he changes and ends up having a good career," Pompea added. Soham Parekh didn't respond to CNBC Make It's request for comment.
Business Insider
11-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Anam builds digital humans that can have lifelike conversations. Read the pitch deck that it used to raise $9 million.
Anam has raised $9 million to build AI personas that can converse in real time. The Redpoint-backed company was cofounded by two Synthesia veterans in late 2023. Anam has 2,000 clients and is tracking $5 million in annual revenue, cofounder Caoimhe Murphy said. Redpoint Ventures, with participation from SV Angel, led the latest round. Anam, founded in October 2023 and named for the Irish word for "soul," had previously raised a $2.3 million pre-seed led by Concept Ventures. Today, Anam has 2,000 clients ranging across education, sales, customer support, healthcare, and beyond. The hair brand Schwarzkopf uses Anam as an education tool for stylists, for instance, while language learning platform Preply uses it to simulate learning environments. Other competitors like Tavus and HeyGen are also trying to solve what is a vastly difficult technical problem, Anam cofounder and CEO Caoimhe Murphy told Business Insider — from flawless lip syncing to realistic facial movement to near-immediate response times to the ability to scale to hundreds of thousands of users. "There's no real winner right now," she said of the race to build the highest quality product. "That's why the market's so exciting." Anam generates every pixel of its avatars, Murphy said, as opposed to how other rivals may only partially generate avatars or use a video on loop and just dub the mouth. "That's where real expressivity and natural conversation comes through," she said. The company recently released a feature called One-Shot, which can generate an AI persona from a photograph in minutes. Murphy and Ben Carr, Anam's cofounder and CTO, previously worked together at AI video unicorn Synthesia. Murphy worked in sales, and Carr worked as an AI research engineer. Anam has 16 employees and is tracking $5 million in revenue this year, Murphy said. It makes money by charging per minute of conversation. "They're building the next interface layer between humans and machines," Redpoint partner Meera Clark said in a statement. Here's a look at the pitch deck Anam used to raise $9 million in seed funding. A slide has been redacted to share the deck publicly. Three key bets have allowed us to solve this problem. We are the first company to develop a custom diffusion model and train it on specific data and we have built custom infrastructure to support delivery at speed and scale. Our bets focused on the hardest components of the problem We're changing the status quo Use cases Interview assistant -- leverage Anam's technology to practice interviews or even run them!
Tom's Guide
10-07-2025
- Business
- Tom's Guide
I turned a PDF into a video in under 5 minutes — here's the AI tool that made it happen
I've spent hundreds of hours testing AI video generation tools. All of them have specific stand out features and different uses. Most recently, I used Argil, the AI video generation tool that can take any text, PDF or link and turn it into a video in about five minutes. It's useful for anyone who wants to create multiple types of creative assets. So if you've ever wished your written stories could reach people beyond the written word, this tool is probably for you. Here's what happened when I turned this week's Tom's Guide AI newsletter into a video. Argil is an AI-powered tool that turns written content into short, engaging videos in just a few clicks. Although this tool is $39/month for the classic tier and $149/month for the pro tier, users can try it for free. Althought those tokens go really fast, so you'll probably get more like a few hours than a full week's worth to try the tool. Fairly intuitive, you simply upload your content or paste a link, and Argil uses generative AI to identify key points, summarize them visually and match them with relevant stock footage, animations or avatars. You can customize the tone, pacing and style, then export the result in vertical or horizontal formats for platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts or LinkedIn. It's a game-changer for creators and casual users who want to repurpose content without spending hours editing video. You upload a document or paste in your article, choose your style and format, and Argil handles: Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. We all know attention spans are shorter than ever. Some people don't want to scroll through a 1,200-word piece, even if it's packed with useful info. Video offers another way to deliver the same value, especially on platforms like YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok. Argil cuts the work down to just minutes. For my test, I uploaded a PDF of this week's AI newsletter. It is first-person, structured and had a clear narrative — ideal for visual storytelling. Once uploaded, I selected a professional, energetic tone with dynamic transitions and subtitles. The AI automatically trimmed the content and suggested visuals to match. Within minutes, I had a 90-second video ready to go — no editing software required. I'll start with the issues I had first. There weren't a lot, but they were enough to give users a heads up. First, there is an option to use yourself as an avatar. However, the process was not as easy as what I've experienced with Synthesia. Unlike Synthesia, a video made with my iPhone and uploaded was not the correct format. I tried several times until I finally uploaded the video to ChatGPT and asked it to format my video for Argil. That felt like a step that could have been avoided since most people are probably making videos and uploading them from their phone. Second, if you decide to choose a different avatar once your video has been previewed, you have to manually go frame by frame to change the avatar. This was another time suck that I would have rather avoided. The tool also blurs out the face of the avatar during the preview stage, which is annoying. But where Argil impressed me, is how easy the tool was to use. It also kept the core message of my text intact while trimming away unnecessary fluff. I especially appreciated the ability to export in multiple formats; portrait for Instagram Reels and landscape for YouTube, which made it easy to repurpose the video across platforms. That said, not everything was perfect. Some scene transitions felt a bit generic, the tone and voice felt robotic and the body movements were extremely repetitive. Occasionally the AI missed subtle nuances or tone, requiring a few manual edits on my part if I had the opportunity (and tonkens!) to go back and edit. Still, for something that took less than 10 minutes to produce, the final result was more than impressive. If you're a content creator looking to transform blog posts into video, a marketer aiming to boost SEO and reach on social media or a writer building a visual portfolio, Argil is a no-brainer. It's a fast, simple way to give your existing work new life. While it may not be flawless, it's absolutely good enough to start using today, especially if you want your work to show up in more places with less effort.
