AI and video — new fundings from one VC, Index Ventures

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 397

Real, expressive characters with Hedra

Hedra is a new tool to create characters, avatars with AI. But also one own character. Create, stylise and edit the video. Just launched Character-1.5 that brings sharper visual output, more lifelike animations with natural blinking and head movements. Opinion: A first funding of $10m in a quite crowded field. Hedra has developed its own “foundation” model to edit characters, and this is the technology that Index Ventures supports. A new angle as well, real character and expressive. A market big enough?

Hedra, a very good discovery.

Captions, growing to be the leader in video creation

The mark of $100m fundings has been reached by Captions. Creation of avatars (also in 3D), editing and a larger focus on translation in 28 languages. US venture capital believes in Captions with high profile investors: Sequoia, a16z, Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures. Opinion: Is the market so vast to justify the large funding of Captions, especially when CapCut (ByteDance, video editing) move in this exact direction. Again here, it is all about tech. Captions developed a proprietary engine for it. And it has a high value acknowledged by an impressive investors’ line-up.

Captions, because Captions is also good at captions.

Classifying videos automatically, this is Twelve Labs

Twelve Labs is a software that recognises what is in a video, generates the corresponding keywords and classifies it all. Own engines, Marengo for video search (“any to any”9 and Pegasus as a text machine. 3 APIs for search, generate summaries and classify. Opinion: This is a major convincing use case where machines are better and faster than humans. Referencing videos with keywords for search, a thing which was partly done manually. A kind of revolution for any producers of videos, many videos.

One of the best use case in favour of AI!