Scale is thrilled to announce our Series A investment in Tavus. The company is a leader in productizing the latest research in AI video generation – and applying this to enable customers to speak directly to each and every end-user at scale.
In its focus on video generation, Tavus is, of course, in good company, with products like Pika and OpenAI’s Sora in text-to-scene, and peers in avatar generation like Synthesia. Like these peers, Tavus enables a user with no specialized skill to create a video representation of the real world from text inputs, with greater ease than by using a camera. Tavus stands apart, however, with its unique focus on applying these research advancements in video generation to address the business problem of creating at-scale 1:1 interaction with customers and users.
Personalized webcam-style videos reliably deliver increased user attention and engagement. Over the last decade, sending human-created personalized videos has become a mainstay tactic for customer-facing professionals with high-dollar-value relationships, where the cost and effort of 1:1 video creation can be justified. Though it’s highly effective, broader adoption has been limited by the cost and headaches of manual video production.This is the specific problem that Tavus, to date, has addressed for sales & marketing organizations, with an application-layer video product that uniquely enables customers to scale the magic of 1:1 personalized videos.
In tandem with this product’s development, Tavus’s research focus has always been on leveraging the latest advancements to unlock personalized video communication for any at-scale use case. This is the product roadmap that we chose to invest behind in summer 2023.
We are announcing our round today in parallel with two major developments at Tavus that further this focus:
- The public announcement of its Phoenix model, which uses NeRF technology to generate exceptionally realistic talking-head videos from a ~3 minute training sample.
- The launch of the Tavus Developer Platform, a first-of-its-kind offering that gives product builders access to the company’s Phoenix model. The Tavus Platform now enables any developer to build a product experience around the attention-winning benefits of highly relevant personalized video.
Since founding the company in 2020, Hassaan Raza and Quinn Favret have been focused on applying the latest in AI research to automate personalized video creation, beginning with a then-best-in-class approach to word and phrase replacement through lip-sync that has since paved the way for the research effort behind Phoenix. With the launch of their Phoenix model and Developer Platform, Tavus is offering customers expanded automation at the edge of what today’s latest research allows.
Amid an AI research landscape that is moving with tremendous speed, it is this sort of nimble approach in applying the latest-and-greatest in AI research to a rich business problem that we at Scale are focused on investing in through our Applied AI vertical. Congrats to the team at Tavus on your latest launch!