Captions Raises $60 Million for AI-Powered Video Creation Platform

Captions has raised $60 million in a Series C funding round to invest in its generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platform for creating and editing video.

The company will use the new funding to grow its machine learning (ML) team and continue investing in its in-house research efforts and technical infrastructure, Captions said in a Tuesday (July 9) press release.

The new funding round brings the company’s total capital raised to $100 million and its valuation to $500 million, according to the release.

Gaurav Misra, co-founder and CEO of Captions, said in the release that the company looks forward to “furthering our mission of democratizing video creation, so that anyone can effectively share their stories or ideas.”

Captions offers a suite of tools that are dedicated to recording, editing and enhancing videos in which a creator addresses the camera directly, according to the release.

It also recently launched AI Creator, which lets users generate these “talking videos” entirely, the release said. This tool is being used to generate content such as organic social posts and ads for small businesses.

The company’s suite of tools covers avatars, editing, captioning, dubbing and audio correction, per the release.

Damir Becirovic, partner at Index Ventures, which led Captions’ latest funding round, said in the release that Captions’ AI-enabled video creation product enables “a higher dimension of storytelling.”

“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,” Becirovic said. “The result will be a huge wave of incredible stories that are imagined and directed by Captions users.”

This announcement comes a week after it was reported that AI-powered video startup Runway is looking to raise $450 million at a valuation of $4 billion.

Runway, which offers software that generates videos from text prompts or images, raised $141 million in June 2023 and was valued at $1.5 billion.

In June, AI startup Luma AI unveiled a tool that can generate realistic video footage from a few lines of text, opening up new possibilities for rapid video creation.

With Luma AI’s Dream Machine platform, users can type in a descriptive prompt and have it rendered as a high-definition video clip generated in minutes.