This follows a pre-seed round in 2023 in which Argil raised €1 million from Seedcamp and Axeleo.

Argil’s founding team of content creators recognised that high-quality content, whether it be training videos for platforms like Masterclass, or influencer content for sites such as YouTube and TikTok, is expensive and time intensive to produce. Added to this, given the growth of these platforms, the bar for “quality content” that cuts through is only getting higher.  

The app meets creators’ growing need to develop video content with humanlike AI avatars in response to consumer demand – video has rapidly become a preferred content medium for customers and social media platforms are becoming increasingly video-centric. From Snapchat, to Reels, and now even LinkedIn’s recently launched short-form video function, video content is in high demand – content creators and businesses of all sizes will need to buy into this new landscape to stay competitive.

Argil has built an application that allows creators to virtually clone themselves, creating real-life multilingual AI avatars from videos uploaded to the platform; it’s hyper-realistic, generated for a low subscription fee (starting at $1/ minute of video), and postable in a matter of minutes rather than weeks.  

The platform includes an AI-enabled pre-editing feature that drastically reduces the time and effort required to create a social-media ready video. As well as building their own avatars that can speak any language, users also get access to a library of other virtual avatars. In addition, the platform offers templates to easily convert any existing text-based and audio content, such as articles or podcasts, into engaging video content featuring their avatar.

The current AI avatar landscape is dominated by robotic, detectably fake avatars that struggle to engage audiences and are primarily used for training in enterprise companies. Argil crushes these limitations, offering a fun, interactive process with a user-friendly interface for creators including B-roll, captions, AI images, and translations. Users can leverage their body language and expressions resulting in warmer, more personalised and relatable content.

Argil already has a strong client base, including YouTubers with millions of followers. It is also used by the estates of stars like Audrey Hepburn, which are leveraging  Argil’s technology to revive late celebrities and create content for a whole new generation of fans. 

Laodis Menard, CEO and Co-Founder, commented: “I produced a lot of video content after leading product marketing at a French unicorn. I loved it, but found creating videos was becoming increasingly costly and time intensive. I was also lucky to be confident in front of the camera, a luxury not everyone has. At Argil, we want to democratize the production process to allow anyone to create engaging videos with realistic avatars that bring their original vision to life; AI allows us to do this quickly and cheaply. Demand for video content will continue to grow, and we need novel technology such as AI to fulfil this demand. We’ll make creating an engaging video as easy as writing a tweet.”

Ted Persson, Partner at EQT Ventures, added: “Argil is perfectly positioned to benefit from two megatrends – AI and the creator economy, the latter of which has helped to make synthetic media one of the fastest adopted forms of technology in the past year. We are hugely impressed by the team’s practical experience operating within this field and their ability to pack so much technology into a sleek platform the whole team has enjoyed demoing! We welcome Laodis and Brivael to the portfolio.”

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