AI-powered videos, capable of altering a real person’s speech or generating synthetic individuals for on-demand speaking, have garnered significant attention. A few years ago, former football legend David Beckham popularized this technology by participating in a video for Synthesia, where he spoke various languages in support of a Malaria charity campaign.
Beyond their novelty and potential for disinformation, these tools offer numerous practical applications, and the market for them is thriving. Synthesia, as mentioned earlier, raised $90 million this year for its versatile platform, used for tasks such as creating product videos and generating personalized videos from plain text. In total, they’ve secured $156.6 million in funding to date.
Nonetheless, producing these videos at scale for numerous products presents significant challenges, often necessitating extensive manual intervention.
Enter Oxolo, a Hamburg-based German startup that has devised an innovative approach using generative AI.
Here’s how it operates: Suppose a company intends to conduct corporate training. With Oxolo, they can construct tailored videos for different employee types based on factors like management level, gender, and location. These videos are then distributed, and their performance is automatically compared in an A/B fashion. If an employee loses interest in a video, it is swiftly adjusted and replaced with a more engaging alternative. This same concept can be applied to product videos, continually improving their performance.
Elisabeth L’Orange, Co-Founder and CCO of Oxolo, explains, “Other platforms may offer avatars and templates, requiring manual text input. With Oxolo, you simply provide a product link—let’s say for socks—paste it into Oxolo, click ‘generate,’ and you receive a complete product video. No additional content is needed, and you can edit it without the need for manual considerations.”
Oxolo was founded by L’Orange, a former Venture Partner with Neuhaus Partners, and Heiko Hubertz, the former Founder & CEO of Bigpoint games. Oxolo’s AI seamlessly integrates images, context, text-to-speech capabilities, and human-based avatars.
Oxolo has now secured €13 million in a Series A funding round led by DN Capital, with participation from German Angel investors, including Christian Vollmann, Johannes Plehn, Thomas Hagemann, Stefan Wiskemann, Alex Täubert, and Mischa Ruerup.
According to Market Growth Reports, the current market size for tools that facilitate video advertising content creation is estimated at $1.0-$1.5 billion in 2023. It is projected to experience a 15-20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next 5-7 years, reaching $3.4 billion in 2028 and $4.3 billion by 2030.
