Argil, the video engine for the creator economy, announced on Wednesday that it has raised €4.9M in pre-seed and seed funding rounds combined as it emerges from the Y Combinator incubator.
The company raised €3.9M in a round led by EQT Ventures and with participation from renowned YouTuber Kwebblekop, who has over 15M subscribers and uses Argil to grow his own Youtube channel, and Charles Gorintin, Cofounder & CTO of Alan, cofounding advisor of Mistral AI.
The funding announcement follows a pre-seed round in 2023 in which Argil raised €1M from Seedcamp and Axeleo.
Argil: Video engine for the creator economy
Led by Laodis Menard, Argil platform converts video, text, and audio-based content into AI-generated human-like and multilingual avatars in only a few minutes and for a minimal subscription fee (starting at $1/ minute of video).
According to the company, it is beneficial to brands and creators who find it difficult to meet the cost of creating multiple videos to continue engaging with their audiences.
The platform includes an AI-enabled pre-editing feature that significantly reduces the time and effort needed to create videos ready for social media.
Users can create avatars that can speak any language, and they also have access to a library of additional virtual avatars.
Furthermore, the platform provides templates to easily transform existing text-based or audio content, such as articles or podcasts, into engaging video content featuring the user’s avatar.
The current AI avatar landscape is dominated by robotic, detectably fake avatars that struggle to engage audiences and are primarily used for training in enterprise companies.
The company overcomes these limitations, offering a fun, interactive process with a user-friendly interface for creators including B-roll, captions, AI images and translations.
Users can leverage their body language and expressions resulting in warmer, more personalised, and relatable content.
Argil already has a huge client base, including YouTubers with millions of followers. It is also used by the estates of stars like Audrey Hepburn, who are leveraging Argil’s technology to revive late celebrities and create content for a whole new generation of fans.
Laodis Menard, CEO, and Co-Founder, comments, “I produced a lot of video content after leading product marketing at a French unicorn. I loved it, but found creating videos was becoming increasingly costly and ttime-intensive I was also lucky to be confident in front of the camera, a luxury not everyone has. At Argil, we want to democratize the production process to allow anyone to create engaging videos with realistic avatars that bring their original vision to life; AI allows us to do this quickly and cheaply. Demand for video content will continue to grow, and we need novel technology such as AI to fulfill this demand. We’ll make creating an engaging video as easy as writing a tweet”.
The investor
EQT Ventures is an early-stage lead investor founded by experienced operators, helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses.
Based in Luxembourg, with advisors in cities like Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, New York, Berlin, and Paris, the firm is currently investing from its largest-ever third €1.1B fund.
EQT Ventures is one of the most active VC firms, collaborating with numerous ambitious founders and startups.
Ted Persson, Partner at EQT Ventures, adds, “Argil is perfectly positioned to benefit from two megatrends – AI and the creator economy, the latter of which has helped to make synthetic media one of the fastest adopted forms of technology in the past year. We are hugely impressed by the team’s practical experience operating within this field and their ability to pack so much technology into a sleek platform the whole team has enjoyed demoing! We welcome Laodis and Brivael to the portfolio.”
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