AI-generated video has entered the mainstream, thanks to OpenAI’s viral Sora app, which lets people cast friends, family, and departed celebrities in improbable, fantastical videos. The space, whose market size was 3.86 billion in 2024, is projected to expand to 42.29 billion by 2033, according to Grand View Research.
Last week, Forbes reported that Synthesia, an AI video company that focuses on helping large enterprises with their training videos, had raised $200 million, valuing the company at $4 billion. And now comes another commercial growth indicator.
Los Angeles-based HeyGen, which is tackling the business video market from a different angle, said it has grown to $100 million in recurring revenue, through giving businesses tools to create their own marketing videos.
Co-founder and CEO Joshua Xu decided to start HeyGen after, as a camera-shy engineer, he experienced fear over recording videos of himself. He realized that with AI, he would be able to skip the entire recording process.
That realization, paired with video’s ascension as an important marketing tool for reaching customers, has enabled HeyGen to scale to almost 200,000 paying customers and $100 million in recurring revenue, after starting off last year in the single-digit millions of revenue.
HeyGen customers upload a photo or video clip of themselves, which can then be turned into an entire sales or marketing video, for instance a personalized pitch to a prospective customer, or a TikTok product tutorial.
“We’ve been laser focused on one thing, which is building the highest quality, most realistic avatar that people can use for videos,” Xu said.
Building on that success and intent on staking out an ever bigger claim in a fast developing market, HeyGen is now going after the entire video production process, typically a laborious process involving cuts, specialized editors and entire teams. The startup recently released a “video agent” that promises to perform many of the tasks a professional video editor would do, like voiceovers and selecting visuals, and even rudimentary script writing. Still, it’s an open question whether or not AI can replace the human creative taste required to edit a video.
HeyGen is satisfying the deeply human desire to see the faces of other humans talking, said investor and board member Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction, an AI-focused venture capital fund. Guo hosts a podcast called No Priors, and said she was surprised by the demand to put on YouTube videos of her podcast recordings.
“Everybody wants to communicate their creativity and point of view, but a small minority of people have access to professional production and are comfortable in front of a camera,” she said. “HeyGen is trying to make it available to everybody.”
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