Tavus secures $6.1M seed, led by Sequoia, to power AI personalized videos

Today is a big day at Tavus! We just announced our $6.1M seed round led by Sequoia Capital, alongside REMUS Capital, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures, GTM Fund, Mantis Capital, Hack VC, Terra Nova, Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Soma Capital, Zillionize, and other incredible partners and builders. 

This funding will enable us to grow our team to further develop the Tavus AI video generation platform, and continue to lead in the scalable personalized video space. Our platform enables users to record a single video, and within a few clicks, create thousands of versions of that video, tailored to each specific member of their audience with their name, info about them and more.

How we got here

Today’s world is filled with canned sales emails that are impersonal, where most marketing is filled with stock content, and ultimately where the effectiveness of traditional marketing has declined severely. At the same time, audience engagement has become a scarce and valuable resource—and capturing attention has become increasingly challenging. We experienced this problem firsthand while helping founders at our first company, Simublade. While Simublade is a product studio, we shared marketing advice to help our clients who were struggling to scale their businesses. They tried cold emails, LinkedIn messages, and more, but they couldn’t engage their core audiences.

So one night, we decided to test personalized videos. Instead of going to sleep, we turned on our cameras and recorded 200 personalized videos where we personally greeted them by name, scrolled through their LinkedIns, and talked about their profiles. The results were astronomical: we saw a 450% increase in response rates and 300% increase in demos booked. It was awe inspiring. But the process was grueling - each recording felt like a never-ending ordeal, as we struggled to capture the same monotonous videos over and over again. We were trapped in an endless cycle, leaving us drained. Not only was this approach non-scalable, it also felt like a complete waste of time.

That was our lightbulb moment - we could use AI to unlock these results at scale. That day, Tavus was born.

Leading in the generative AI video space

Founded in 2021, Tavus enables users to engage with their audiences through AI-generated videos that are contextual to them, allowing them to focus on what matters most, building human connection. Tavus accomplishes this by cloning the face and voice of a user, automatically generating pixel-perfect videos that accurately imitate real people – not actors or avatars. No more manual recording needed.

With Tavus, you:

• Record one video,
• Select all the words and phrases you’d like to convert to variables within the video for personalization. You can customize anything that’s said or shown! (think @firstname or @personalizedintro)
• Generate the next hundred, thousand, or even million videos in just a few clicks, and 
• Send them directly through any CRM and existing marketing tools

And get:

• Ultra-realistic videos with HD lip sync and voice clone
• Variable video backgrounds which highlight your audiences company website or linkedin page, 
• Landing pages custom designed to match your brand, and 
• ROI that will drive you to implement video across your company!
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Tavus is designed to fit directly into existing workflows, and applies broadly across a business to drive audience engagement across the board, whether that be through sales and marketing campaigns, converting inbound leads, retaining customers, recruiting top talent, or dozens of other use cases. For example, if a lead submits a form from your website, they can automatically receive a customized Tavus video follow-up instead of a standard email, significantly increasing the probability of conversion. 

With just a few clicks, teams – from small businesses to enterprises – can easily share hundreds or thousands of videos specifically tailored to each member of their audience, leading to customers seeing results of upwards of 10x increase in engagement, 5x jumps in click through rates, and 8x increases in conversions. A flag ship customer started using Tavus nearly two years ago generating 300 videos a month for cold outreach. Today, they generate 15,000 videos per month across several use cases, and Tavus is their primary go to market strategy, driving incredible conversions and powering their growth.

Our videos overcome the hurdle of attention fatigue by connecting with people on an unconscious level first, by hearing their name and seeing content that’s relevant to them. Personalized videos not only overcome indifference. They inspire enthusiasm.

We bring that energy to everything we do. In fact, it starts with our name. Tavus is the Turkish word for peacock. And like the majestic bird, Tavus users stand out and captivate their audiences. 

The road ahead

For us, this is just the beginning. Video is continuing to become the predominant way people want to consume content, and with the help of this funding milestone, we will continue to innovate and lead the way for immersive, hyper-contextual content that brings users delight and makes digital interactions more personal. 

We already find ourselves in exceptional company in the world of generative AI. In November 2022, ChatGPT took the world by storm, and continues to do so. It's just one example out of many of the rise of generative AI and the promise it holds for transforming how we communicate and work. Today, generative AI videos are novel and cutting-edge, engaging audiences of all kinds. Tomorrow, they’ll be the norm in how we create and consume content, with every piece of content being curated and personalized just for us .

If the Tavus mission inspires you, we invite you to join our team, see the results of Tavus firsthand, and follow our journey. We're transforming how we engage with our audience, and we'd love to do it with you.

- Hassaan & Quinn