Victor Riparbelli: Bringing AI Video to the Fortune 100

Growing up in Denmark, Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli immersed himself in science fiction. Video games like World of Warcraft and films like Gattaca offered a glimpse of what it meant to build entire worlds from imagination alone. Early in his career, that curiosity led him into emerging technologies like AR and VR, and then to a more powerful idea: AI could give anyone the ability to create video — perhaps even Hollywood-style films — on nothing more than a laptop. That insight became the seed of Synthesia.

How Victor Riparbelli identified a more powerful opportunity for Synthesia

In its early days, the company worked with film studios and advertising agencies, using AI to translate and dub video into multiple languages.

But around 2021, four years after the company’s founding, a more consequential realization followed. The most important applications of new technology, Riparbelli discovered, aren’t necessarily the flashiest. The people who needed Synthesia most weren’t in Hollywood — they were inside large organizations. The future for Synthesia was more PowerPoint than Pixar.

That shift put the company on its current trajectory: Using AI-generated video and highly realistic avatars to help companies create training, onboarding, and skills-development content in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional video production. Recently valued at $4 billion, Synthesia now serves more than 60,000 customers worldwide and works with 90% of the Fortune 100, including SAP, Bosch, Merck, Zoom, Mondelez, Reuters, and Siemens.

In this conversation, part of our series on European startups, Victor Riparbelli talks about Synthesia’s origins, why AI videos are driving real value for enterprises, and how the environment for European startups is changing.

Having grown up in and attended university in Denmark, how did you wind up starting Synthesia in London?

Victor Riparbelli: As part of my bachelor's degree (at the IT University of Copenhagen), I spent a semester at Stanford. It was transformative. I discovered a very different way of thinking and a different level of ambition than I was used to in Denmark. People had these really big, crazy ideas, which made me realize that I wanted to build a company.

I considered moving to the US, but the easiest way to get a visa is through a job at a big company, and I didn't want to do that. London seemed to have a great ecosystem for building VR companies, which I was interested in at the time, so I moved there. That’s where I met Matthias Niessner, who later became my cofounder at Synthesia. He had written one of the first research papers on AI video. Today, this doesn’t sound very impressive. But back then, in 2017, I felt like I saw magic for the first time. I became obsessed with this idea of using AI to generate video, which back then was called synthetic media. I remember thinking, this is going to be like the shift from the printing press to typing on keyboards. That was the founding moment for Synthesia.

How did Synthesia pivot from AI language translation and dubbing for films and ads to creating videos for enterprises?

VR: The dubbing and translation product was mildly successful. We ran it for three years, but it wasn’t a very big or scalable business. It took two PhDs something like 10 days to make a 30 second clip.

Around 2021, we started getting a lot of inquiries from people we weren’t expecting. They were mostly big companies asking, “Can you help me make a video? I don't know how to use a video camera. I can't get a budget from my boss.” They wanted to make training or onboarding videos for their employees, most of them involving a talking head. That got us thinking about using avatars as a way to make videos very quickly and affordably.

How much interest are you now seeing from the market?

VR: It’s huge. I believe we’re in the middle of a shift from print to video. Most people spend their lives watching video and listening to audio. Then they go to work and everything is text. This creates a strange disparity. Everyone in the enterprise knows that to keep people's attention, you need to make video, but the cost, time, and complexity of production have been too high.

We’re also seeing a rare convergence of AI video becoming more capable at the same time that upskilling and internal knowledge sharing are becoming board-level priorities for many companies.

You recently did a $200 million series E funding round. What does that signify for Synthesia?

VR: A big focus is moving to the next generation of the product, which is conversational interactive video powered by AI agents. Instead of just watching a video, you're interacting with it. In a sales training video, for example, you can role-play with an AI customer. It helps you learn how to position your product against competitors, just like a human coach would but it’s available any time, at infinite scale.

For customers, it also means they can verify that employees are actually learning. The product, called Skills, launches in a couple of months.

Will people mind talking to AI versus a real person?

VR: In the rollouts so far, people really love it. It gives them a safe place to practice. You’re not in front of a customer or your manager, so you don’t worry about asking stupid questions or looking like you don’t understand something.

Many companies test AI tools but struggle to scale them. What have you learned?

VR: We have this internal principle called utility over novelty. AI has a big wow factor, so a lot of people want to play around with it or demo it. It’s easy to build things that look impressive but don’t actually solve customer problems.

At Synthesia, we shut down projects that are innovation for its own sake. A lot of the reasons people love our products is because we spend time building not only cool new things that go viral on Twitter, but features that aren’t flashy — like tools for collaborating with coworkers on videos. For someone who has to make five videos every week, this makes a huge difference in terms of their workflow.

Looking ahead five years, what does success look like for Synthesia?

VR: Interactive, conversational video will make up most of what our customers create. These will include an AI customer support agent and a recruiting product for interviewing candidates. And the quality of even simple training videos will look like they were produced by a movie director.

How optimistic are you about the European startup scene?

VR: Historically, Europe has had structural challenges. Pension funds invest very little in venture capital, which is a very easy way to get more funding into the tech sector. And EU regulation can feel like sand in the machine. Sometimes the mindset is still anti-business.

But that’s changing. We now have European companies competing globally, and the recent Davos speech by Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, felt like a real shift. The new EU-INC initiative, a unified European company structure, could make Europe one of the easiest places in the world to start, fund, and grow a tech company. And Europe is realizing that a strong tech sector isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s necessary if we want to be independent and maintain our standard of living.

How do you see Europe as a market for Synthesia?

VR: It’s a huge opportunity for us. Language is a big factor in Europe and our platform makes it easy to communicate across many languages. There are also lots of large, traditional companies here, which is where our product works especially well. We work with 95% of the DAX 40 in Germany, and we’re continuing to expand. We have offices in Munich, Amsterdam, and London, and we’re opening one in Paris. It is important to hire people that speak the local language and we’re definitely going to ramp up on hiring across the European market.

Victor Riparbelli is the CEO of Synthesia, an AI video generation platform for businesses, which he co-founded in 2017. GV first invested in Synthesia’s Series B financing in 2021 and most recently led their Series E in January 2026. GV General Partner, Vidu Shanmugarajah, is a board observer. He grew up in Denmark, studied computer science at the IT University of Copenhagen, and helped to establish Project Europe, a collective supporting the next generation of European tech founders.