Argil, a French AI startup focusing video manufacturing, has raised €4.9 million in pre-seed and seed funding to increase its modern platform for creators, educators, and companies. The most recent spherical, led by EQT Ventures, builds on an earlier €1 million pre-seed funding from Seedcamp and Axeleo. Different notable traders embody YouTuber Kwebbelkop and Charles Gorintin, co-founder of Alan and Mistral AI.
CEO and Co-founder Laodis Menard drew on his expertise in product advertising and marketing at a French unicorn to develop Argil: “I produced a variety of video content material after main product advertising and marketing at a French unicorn. I cherished it, however discovered creating movies was turning into more and more pricey and time intensive. I used to be additionally fortunate to be assured in entrance of the digital camera, a luxurious not everybody has. At Argil, we need to democratize the manufacturing course of to permit anybody to create partaking movies with life like avatars that deliver their unique imaginative and prescient to life; AI permits us to do that shortly and cheaply. Demand for video content material will proceed to develop, and we’d like novel know-how akin to AI to meet this demand. We’ll make creating an attractive video as straightforward as writing a tweet.”
Rising from the Y Combinator incubator, Argil’s mission is to democratise video manufacturing with AI-powered instruments that make high-quality, personalised content material accessible to all. Its platform permits customers to create hyper-realistic avatars, skilled from uploaded movies, to supply multilingual, ready-to-post movies in minutes. Beginning at round €1 per video minute, Argil’s resolution addresses the rising demand for video content material in at the moment’s creator-driven digital financial system.
Argil’s know-how presents life-like AI avatars with pure physique language and expressions, a distinction, Argil argues, to the robotic avatars generally utilized in company coaching. The platform allows creators to transform current textual content and audio content material into partaking video codecs and contains AI-assisted pre-editing instruments, captioning, and B-roll integration.
Argil’s know-how has already gained traction amongst YouTubers and even the estates of late celebrities, akin to Audrey Hepburn, utilizing the platform to reimagine stars for brand spanking new audiences.
EQT Ventures Companion Ted Persson highlighted Argil’s potential: “Argil is completely positioned to profit from two megatrends – AI and the creator financial system, the latter of which has helped to make artificial media one of many quickest adopted types of know-how prior to now 12 months. We’re vastly impressed by the crew’s sensible expertise working inside this subject and their capability to pack a lot know-how right into a modern platform the entire crew has loved demoing! We welcome Laodis and Brivael to the portfolio.”
With this funding, Argil plans to scale its operations and refine its platform.
