Video Startup Receives Funding, Uses AI Technology

A Bloomington-based video production startup, which uses artificial intelligence to create videos of people talking, has received a $20,000 investment from Indianapolis-based Elevate Ventures’ Community Ideation Fund.

Founded in 2020, Deep Word uses AI to create “synthetic videos” of people talking. Users upload video of a person talking and upload the audio they want to pair with the video.

The company says it has developed an interface that allows companies to create templates and personalize videos for individual persons or customers.

“Deep Word has really been able to prove out the technology with individual users,” said Cy Megnin, Elevate Ventures’ entrepreneur-in-residence serving Velocities, a partnership supporting startups in south-central Indiana. “What has me most excited about this company is the release of its API, which will allow video production to be truly scalable.”

Chief Executive Officer Ankush Bikkasani says the technology saves users time and money on video production.

“Synthetic video enables the production of custom video content at scale, something which was never feasible with contemporary video production due to time and budgetary constraints,” said Bikkasani. “Deep Word aims to be the go-to enabler of such technology, and this funding will allow us to reach our goals and scale faster.”

Elevate Ventures say Deep Word won a pre-seed award in the Elevate Nexus Regional Pitch Competition in 2020. Last week, it pitched for a seed award in the competition.

Click here for a link to the company website.