From 100 Rejections to $4 Billion: How Synthesia Won Fortune 100

Most AI companies are chasing viral moments. Victor Riparbelli spent three grueling years building technology that barely worked, got rejected by 100 investors, and watched his company struggle in obscurity.

Today, his company Synthesia has crossed $100 million in annual revenue, works with 70% of the Fortune 100, and has raised $330 million to become the world's leading AI video platform. But the path from near-failure to a $4 billion valuation wasn't about finding the perfect technology—it was about finding the right problem to solve.

In this interview, Victor reveals how Synthesia pivoted from Hollywood-grade video dubbing to corporate communications, why going viral can actually hurt your business, and the counterintuitive hiring strategy that helped them outperform teams from Google and Meta.

Victor Riparbelli: I'm Victor Riparbelli, and I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Synthesia. Synthesia is the world's leading AI video platform for the enterprise and for businesses. At its core, what we help our customers do is land whatever message they have for their customers, their employees, their partners with the most engagement and effectiveness possible.

We've built a platform that enables anyone who knows how to use a PowerPoint to create a video. We're all about communicating in video, which is the most effective way to deliver a message today. We crossed $100 million ARR, we've raised $330 million in venture capital. Commercially, we work with more than 70% of the Fortune 100 today. We have more than 65,000 customers all around the world.

Victor Riparbelli: We started the company in 2017. The first three years of the company wasn't very fun, and the tech didn't really work and it was an uphill battle. This was the first time the world really saw a neural network generate video at a pretty high quality, fully automatically. If you saw the output of that face-to-face video and you would have to do that in a visual effects studio, you would be talking millions of dollars to create a clip like this, and this thing actually did it in real time.

When I saw that for the first time, my mind started running. I felt like this is gonna change everything about how we create content. It's also gonna change everything about video itself as a medium. I felt like it was worth exploring starting a company around this technology.

Victor Riparbelli: When we see new technologies, the first thing we do is always imagine all the 1000 ways it can go wrong. Cars, smartphones, AI, video generation, music generation, that's always what we default to. But it just turns out most of the time that technologies end up being used mostly for good things by good people, and there's a subset of people who use them for bad things.

We went out and told people, look, in 10 years, you're gonna be able to make a Hollywood film from your laptop, just with your imagination. You won't need anything else than that, and it's gonna be more or less free to do it. A lot of people thought that was a crazy idea. It was in the AI winter, there had been a lot of disillusionment. A bunch of companies funded in the years before we started had all turned out to not really work because the technology was just too immature.

We got turned down by 100 investors or something like that, until we eventually sent a cold email to Mark Cuban. He was probably the only person we met who totally shared our vision of the future. So he wasn't evaluating the vision, he was brought in on that. He was more evaluating if he thought the team was worth funding and if we had a shot at building something real.

Victor Riparbelli: You need one person to say yes, that's all it takes. Generally, it's easier to try and find people who already share your vision of what's gonna happen in the world as opposed to trying to convince them of it, especially if you're not doing something that's in the current hype cycle.

If in your gut, you truly feel that you're onto something, and that someone, if it's not you, someone is gonna build a big company around the product that you're doing, you should continue. Throughout the entire journey of Synthesia, I've never a day in my life doubted that someone is gonna build a big company around this technology. I could doubt myself sometimes, I could doubt my execution, I could be afraid that I was too early, but I never doubted that this technology was gonna be extremely valuable for the world.

Victor Riparbelli: We started off with a million dollars, which is not a lot of money when you're building a company like what we were trying to build. We had to figure out what we could realistically both build and sell before having to raise the next round.

The first thing we stumbled upon was AI dubbing - give us a real video and we can translate it for you by replacing the voice over with a different language, but then also reanimating the face so it looks like the actor is speaking a different language. That value proposition was actually good enough, but the technology was very early. It only worked if you looked straight at the camera. It took 2 PhDs 10 days to make a 30-second clip. It didn't scale at all, the quality threshold was insanely high.

It was clear to us that it was a vitamin, it wasn't a painkiller. People liked it, they thought it was cool, but if we disappeared, no one was gonna yell and scream. They'd go back to translating the way they did things before.

Victor Riparbelli: We went back to the drawing board and talked to lots of people during this period. We realized that rather than focusing on the people who are already making video all the time, there was a huge group of people, billions of people probably, that weren't making videos at all.

These people were desperate to make video, and they were telling us, "Hey, I want to deliver this message to someone, and I know I should be doing a video because that's what people want to consume. I just don't know where to start. I don't know how to use a camera, my boss won't give me any budget to record it, and I know that there are so many problems after I've actually shot the content."

We learned a lot of what these people wanted to do was corporate videos, and corporate videos are a lot easier than Steven Spielberg films. If we could just help our customers with the talking head style footage, that would be pretty big. That was a much smaller domain than make any kind of Hollywood film you can imagine. So we built this avatar technology that became central to the product today. That's when the company started to really take off very quickly.

Victor Riparbelli: Once we launched the product and had the first avatar MVP out there, we went viral very quickly. We had lots of people coming onto the website, lots of people making free demo videos of avatars by typing in things, because it was fun and cool and they wanted to show all their friends. It's amazing, the first time you see it, you're kind of mind blown.

But a lot of these people did not have any real use case and we could see that in the retention. They weren't coming back, they were just making a few videos, showing it to people, not making any more videos. That wasn't really a sustainable revenue stream for us.

But there was a small group of people who kept using the product, they kept coming back. We went into that group and spent a lot of time speaking to those folks. That's where we uncovered an interesting value equation - these people were not comparing our videos to real videos or camera videos, they're comparing our videos to text documents. When that's the comparison, then the quality threshold looks very different.

Victor Riparbelli: I think a lot of AI apps are feeling this today where you may go viral, have a lot of people who are interested in your product and they come to you and play around with it, but it's really important to understand who are coming because they have a real use case that's recurring and who's coming because it's a cool, fun thing that they want to try out.

Early days of 2021, we had customers who would scream and yell if we shut down the product tomorrow. That's always a good acid test of like, do you have something real or not, or do people kind of mildly care but not really. We realized there were lots of unanswered questions for sure, but there clearly was something - a kernel of something that was huge.

It was exciting in some ways because it felt like it was our little secret and it was for a couple of years. It wasn't very obvious from the outside that anyone had any real use for this tech. That was a fun couple of years when we felt like we know something the rest of the world doesn't, and we're capitalizing on it.

Victor Riparbelli: We figured very early on in 2021 that we wanted to focus on the enterprise because that was clearly where there was the most value to drive and where we could get to the biggest contract size. But it was also very obvious to us that the growth channels and the way to get this in the hands of as many people as possible was not through enterprise sales, it was through just giving people access to the product, letting them play around with it, letting them find their own use case, letting them qualify themselves before they spoke to the sales team.

What was hard is when you're building both a bottoms up motion and you're trying to build a top-down motion, those things conflict in many different ways. As a startup, you have limited resources and a lot of things you build for a big company will have very little impact on a small company. If you build admin tooling for a CIO, a 50-person company is not going to care about that. On the other hand, if you build tools for small businesses, a lot of that will not have value for someone who is a really big business.

There are always these trade-offs that you make, but when you look at the last 10-15 years, some of the companies that have had the most impressive runs are companies that have managed to combine the vacuum effect of PLG where you really get it working right - it's just this vortex that sucks in traffic and converts it into both paying customers and credit cards, but also spits out the world's best enterprise leads with a world-class sales team.

Victor Riparbelli: I think a mistake people often make, especially people who maybe have already had a job in big tech or successful companies, they go out and try to hire people from Google, Meta, OpenAI, whatever the hot companies of our time are. They say, "Hey, I have this cool startup idea, why don't you join me? I'll pay you not as much, but I'll try and pay you almost roughly as much." Of course this can work, there are very smart people who work there who also want to do the startup hustle, but oftentimes you just can't get them or if you do get them, they're used to a very different salary, a very different lifestyle.

The better way of doing it, which is what we did, is to try and find people that are a bit off - they're not the most obvious people to join your startup, but there's something you like about them. That could be that they have a lot of hustle, a lot of grit. Engineers that maybe haven't worked at a tier 1 or tier 2 company, but they have a great open source project that they're managing and updating. There are a lot of other signals you can find with people.

If you can find these people who are truly hungry and want to work at a startup and want to put in the work, you gather a great group of those and they will very often outperform the 10 people who used to work at big tech with their comfy lifestyles. In the early days, finding that ragtag group of underdogs that have the collective energy to go up against the competitors and incumbents - that's your only option.

Victor Riparbelli: I think that there is nothing that prepares you to really start a business like starting a business. Spending 4 years in McKinsey is not going to make you a better entrepreneur. It may give you a little bit more network and may be slightly easier to raise money, but if you actually truly know deep in your heart that you want to build a company and you are a builder, I think you just get started as quickly as you can.

Don't be afraid of starting too early. The doom scenario is rarely as bad as people think it is or make it out to be. Most big companies really value people who have tried to do something themselves, even if they failed.

Victor Riparbelli: I do think that we will see less and less text in the world. I don't think we will be consuming most of our information in text. I think there'll still be a place for text - we still go to the theater, we still listen to vinyl. There'll definitely be a place for text to exist, but I think in the world of information sharing, training, knowledge, I do think that we'll move into a world in which we consume almost everything as video and audio and maybe VR and AR in 10-20 years with those technologies.

I do think that's gonna happen, and I don't think it's gonna be as bad as people think it is. A lot of people are very averse to the idea that people wouldn't necessarily be using text as much as they are today. But I think as humans, it's very clear that we've always been on this trajectory towards more interactive and more visual and more auditory content that reminds us more of actually being in the real world.