text-to-video
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Synthesia Found $4 Billion in the Gap Between PowerPoint and Pixar
The London startup began by making famous faces speak new languages. Its real business arrived when ordinary employees asked for something less glamorous: a way to turn the next PowerPoint, policy update or training manual into video without booking a studio.
HeyGen
HeyGen wants to make the camera optional. Its digital twins, translation tools and video agents turn one human performance into a production system that can speak to almost anyone.
Koyal
Koyal is an agentic AI filmmaking platform (Y Combinator F25) that turns a script or an audio clip - a song, a podcast, a voiceover - into a finished, personalized video with consistent characters, settings and camera work. Founded by CMU/MIT/Meta alumni siblings Mehul and Gauri Agarwal, the company follows a Pixar-style 'audio first, visuals second' approach and has run paid pilots with Universal Music, T-Series and Bollywood studios, producing music videos for artists like A.R. Rahman, Ricky Kej and Shankar Mahadevan.
Knowlify
Knowlify is a Y Combinator (S25) startup building a text-to-explainer video engine that turns documents, PDFs, textbooks and plain text into narrated, animated videos in minutes. Founded by four University of Florida classmates, the company offers a self-serve platform for teams plus a managed studio for high-stakes productions, and has generated over 200,000 videos for organizations including Amazon, ByteDance, Flexport, Supabase and Zoho. In October 2025 Knowlify raised $3 million to make video the default medium for explaining complex information.
DeepBrain AI
DeepBrain AI is a generative-AI company that builds hyper-realistic digital humans. Its flagship platform, AI Studios, turns plain text scripts into professional avatar-led videos in minutes, while its AI Human technology powers real-time conversational avatars used in kiosks, virtual receptionists, banking, and AI news anchors. Founded in Seoul in 2016 and now operating from Palo Alto and beyond, the company serves enterprises across media, finance, education, and the public sector with tools that remove cameras, studios, and actors from video production.
LemonSlice
LemonSlice is a San Francisco AI research and product lab that turns a single photo into a real-time, talking video avatar - the visual face for voice agents and chatbots. Its Lemon Slice-2 model is a purpose-built, large-scale video diffusion transformer that generates every pixel from scratch to produce expressive, full-emotion talking characters (human or cartoon) that livestream at conversational speed. Founded in 2024 by three PhD-creators (formerly Infinity AI), the company raised a $10.5M seed led by Matrix Partners and Y Combinator to make all video interactive.
Rizzle
Rizzle is an AI video creation, distribution, and monetization platform that turns written content - articles, blogs, newsletters and scripts - into polished, brand-safe videos in minutes. Built for publishers, media companies and content creators, it pairs generative AI drafting with human editorial refinement and pre-licensed assets from Getty Images, ElevenLabs and Soundstripe, then syndicates the finished videos across platforms like MSN, Yahoo and NewsBreak. Founded in 2019 by Vidya Narayanan and Lakshminath Dondeti, Rizzle began as a consumer short-video social app that grew to tens of millions of users before pivoting to an enterprise SaaS model for video-first content at scale.
Higgsfield AI
Higgsfield AI is a San Francisco-based generative AI company that builds professional video and image creation tools for creators, marketers, and enterprise teams. Founded in October 2023 by former Snap executive Alex Mashrabov, the platform offers Cinema Studio, Lip-Sync Studio, and a suite of AI models (Sora 2, Kling 3.0, Veo 3.1) for producing cinematic-quality content. The company reached $200M annualized revenue run rate within 9 months of launch, achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation in January 2026 after raising $80M in a Series A extension led by Accel, and hosts 25 million users across 240+ countries generating 4.5 million videos per day.
InVideo
InVideo is an AI-powered video creation platform that turns plain text into polished, publish-ready videos. Founded in 2017 in Mumbai and now headquartered in Daly City, California, the company serves 50+ million users across 190+ countries. Its flagship product InVideo AI lets anyone - from solo creators to enterprise marketing teams - generate scripts, visuals, voiceovers, and complete videos by typing instructions in plain English. In 2025, InVideo became the only platform bundling access to both OpenAI's Sora 2 and Google's VEO 3.1 under a single subscription, cementing its position at the frontier of AI-driven video production.
Luma AI
Luma AI is a Palo Alto-based generative AI lab building multimodal foundation models that turn text, images, and ideas into video, 3D, and interactive scenes. Its flagship product, Dream Machine, has crossed 30 million users; its Ray3 model was the first reasoning-driven video model to generate native 16-bit HDR. Backed by HUMAIN, NVIDIA, Andreessen Horowitz, AMD, and Amplify, the company is racing toward what its founders call 'unified general intelligence' for the physical world.
Pika
Pika is a San Francisco-based generative AI company building a consumer video platform that turns text, images, and clips into short cinematic videos. Founded in 2023 by Stanford AI Lab alumni Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, Pika has shipped a string of fast-iterating model releases (Pika 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2) and viral features like Pikaffects, Scene Ingredients, and Pikaframes. The company has raised roughly $135M from Spark Capital, Lightspeed, Greycroft, and others.