What would you dream of constructing as an entrepreneur when you had limitless money and time?
For two India Institute of Technology grads, Ashray Malhotra and Nisheeth Lahoti, who had gone by way of the ache of closing down their first startup, their reply was easy, however audacious: construct a magic field—a magical AI system, which might take any piece of textual content of enter and sooner or later create a Hollywood stage film.
“Imagine having simply a pc and never really should exit and shoot something. AI can do all the things in your behalf. The thought resonated so much with me. Because after I was in faculty, I used to make quick movies. And as with all people who’s made skilled high quality movies, you realise the issues related to that course of—something can go improper. And fairly often in our skilled high quality video that we had been capturing, Murphy’s Law all the time applies. So, that is once we began to work on this idea of constructing that end-to-end textual content film engine,” says Ashray Malhotra.
(l-r) Ashray Maholtra, Nisheeth Lahoti and Shivam Mangla, Co-Founders of Rephrase.aiRephrase.ai
Malhotra is the co-founder and CEO of Rephrase.AI, who alongside together with his co-founders Nisheeth Lahoti and Shivam Mangla based the corporate in Bangalore, India in 2019.The three co-founders had been named to the 2021 Forbes Asia 30 underneath 30 listing. Rephrase.ai goals to democratise video, making high-quality video creation capabilities obtainable to corporations of all sizes throughout all industries by offering deep tech, generative AI instruments to create skilled movies with the benefit of writing textual content.
While beginning on what they anticipated to be lengthy journey to create the AI engine of their goals, they knew they would wish quick time period, monetizable merchandise. “That’s once we really began to work on constructing strategies and expertise that may create a digital avatar of an individual which implies a digital copy of a face, digital copy of your voice, and create movies of individuals trying into the digicam and we perfected this expertise early final 12 months,” says Malhotra.
It took just a few years to get the expertise proper, however the firm now has labored with over 50 giant enterprises, together with blue chip names like Amazon, Microsoft, Mondelez, Johnson & Johnson and Franklin Templeton with each B2C and B2B use instances. “We’ve created over 50 digital clones of CXOs and a number of the largest celebrities throughout India and U.S. We not too long ago labored with a pharma firm the place we created avatars of the VP of gross sales to assist her talk with each single gross sales rep personally, to assist her construct a one-on-one relationship with folks that she would have liked to construct in particular person however wasn’t capable of as a result of she was in a distributed distant workforce,” Malhotra.
Rephrase.ai makes use of a consumption-based SaaS enterprise mannequin. There is a one-time charge to create and arrange the platform. Then there’s a recurring part of permitting prospects to purchase credit to create extra movies on their very own.
At the start, the founders had been fortunate to have early angel investments and backing from Techstars India after they we simply constructing the expertise when few folks had heard of generative AI. But the magic of their demos and ever-increasing buyer listing allowed the corporate to draw $12.2 million in funding so far. Its newest $10.6 million Series A spherical of funding in September of 2022 was led by Red Ventures. Other traders on this spherical embrace Silver Lake, 8VC, and others. An earlier seed spherical for $1.5 million was raised by Lightspeed and AV8 Ventures.
Malhotra grew up in a small city in India and, like his co-founders, graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. But he by no means deliberate to be an entrepreneur. “When I used to be in faculty, I used to imagine, I’d argue like most faculty youngsters imagine that to construct actually superb merchandise you want hundreds of individuals and tens of millions of {dollars}. But on the MIT Media Labs ReDx camp, I used to be a part of a cross purposeful group, together with information scientists, software program, engineers, dentists and businesspeople who in a span of per week constructed a proof of idea for a toothbrush inside which you can put a digicam inside that may detect a cavity earlier than it really turned cavities,” says Malhotra. That expertise made him imagine {that a} small group of devoted sensible folks might do superb issues in a brief period of time. Why not him?
While engaged on his grasp’s in engineering, he and Lahoti based SoundRex in 2016. The firm allows wi-fi transmission of high-fidelity audio at very low latencies by way of using algorithms primarily based round machine studying and human auditory fashions. The firm would fail after two years, however that failure led to the event of Rephase.ai in 2019
As for the long run? After specializing in constructing the platform’s enterprise communications capabilities past the enterprise to corporations of all sizes over the subsequent 5 years, past that “you need to have the ability to construct this engine the place I see each particular person on the web having a digital clone and with the ability to create an expert high quality video of a stage which they don’t have entry to right now,” concludes Malhotra.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMib2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmZvcmJlcy5jb20vc2l0ZXMvYnJ1Y2Vyb2dlcnMvMjAyMi8xMS8yNy9yZXBocmFzZWFpLWFpbXMtdG8tZGVtb2NyYXRpc2UtaGlnaC1xdWFsaXR5LXZpZGVvLWNyZWF0aW9uL9IBAA?oc=5
