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Argil secures €4.9m to enable anyone to become a creator with their own AI video clone
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Argil secures €4.9m to enable anyone to become a creator with their own AI video clone

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November 27, 2024

Anna Wood is the Editor of Startups Magazine. She joined…

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. 

See Also
When global labour market data is released, headlines tend to fixate on a single metric: unemployment. This year is no different. According to the latest figures from the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation, global unemployment remains relatively stable at just under five per cent. At face value, this suggests a labour market that is holding firm despite economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability and technological upheaval. In reality, it masks a serious and underreported problem: the true global jobs crisis is not a lack of work, but the growing scale of informal work. More than 2.1 billion people worldwide are employed in the informal economy, including misclassified workers operating outside effective regulatory coverage, where employment is typically unregistered, contracts are absent or unenforced, and access to labour rights and social protections is limited or non-existent. That represents a large portion of the global workforce. If unemployment reveals how many people cannot find work, informality shows how many are working without protection or long-term opportunity. Informal work is often associated with developing economies or unregulated sectors. However, this form of work is increasingly occurring within developed economies and regulated sectors, hidden within otherwise legitimate, fast-growing small and medium-sized enterprises – and this is often unintentional. For both businesses operating solely in domestic markets and those that have expanded abroad, adopting new workforce models and attempting to respond to rapid technological change, the crisis of informality is emerging in three key areas. The first is worker misclassification. Individuals are engaged as independent contractors but operate in practice like employees – working fulltime, at set hours, for years at a time. This is particularly prevalent in gig and platform-based roles, where algorithms determine pay, hours and performance without considering employment rights. Gig and platform work often presents as flexible and empowering, however, in practice, many platforms exercise employer-like control over payment, performance management, hours, and length of engagement, while explicitly avoiding employer obligations such as tax filings and the provision of statutory benefits like annual leave and healthcare. The result is a growing cohort of workers who fall between legal categories, carrying the risks of self-employment without the autonomy or protections that should accompany this mode of work. The second area is cross-border remote work, where informality can inadvertently arise. With post-COVID remote working models here to stay, companies are directly hiring overseas talent, assuming that because the worker is not based in the company’s home country, local employment laws do not apply. Where employment is not properly registered (whether by the employer and/or employee), local labour law is not applied, or social security obligations are misunderstood or ignored, these arrangements can slip into a form of modern informality, even where the relationship appears to be formal on the surface. This is often the point at which organisations begin to seek external guidance. In many cases, neither party fully understands the legal implications of the arrangement, which leaves both employer and worker exposed. We frequently see organisations approach us when a specific issue surfaces, such as payroll inconsistencies, questions around benefits entitlement, or concerns raised by the workers themselves, including registration process failures. Business leaders should also be aware that permanent establishment risk can arise if a remote employee is deemed to represent the company locally, which can trigger corporate tax obligations. Social security errors can happen when contributions are not made correctly in either jurisdiction, leaving workers without coverage and employers facing backdated liabilities. Meanwhile, employment law conflicts can emerge when contracts fail to meet the requirements of the host country regarding notice periods, benefits or termination rights. The third driver of informality is structural. These arrangements are becoming more common as artificial intelligence and evolving workforce models outpace regulation. Businesses are innovating at speed, but legal frameworks are struggling to keep pace. The UK’s Employment Rights Act offers a clear case study of the direction of travel. Worker protections are expanding, classification rules are tightening and enforcement is becoming more coordinated across agencies. Informal arrangements that once sat in legal grey areas are moving firmly into view and what was previously tolerated is falling under scrutiny. The challenge is that informality is rarely a deliberate choice. For many growing organisations, it becomes the default because compliant pathways are complicated and difficult to navigate alone, particularly across multiple jurisdictions. Legal advice, payroll, tax, HR, and immigration compliance are often siloed, leaving gaps that businesses may not even realise exist until a problem arises. For instance, digital nomad visas are often viewed as providing holders with wholly compliant right to work status, however employers may not realise that this is not always the case and contracts may not reflect the correct legal status or entitlements. Addressing informality requires a change in how we think about employment at a global level and recognising that flexibility and compliance are not mutually exclusive. Businesses need models that allow them to access global talent quickly while ensuring workers are properly employed and protected under local law. As attention remains fixed on unemployment figures, informality continues to expand beneath the surface. It is this hidden cohort of workers, contributing economically without security or rights, that represents the real crisis in the global labour market. Solving it will require coordinated action from policymakers and businesses alike, and a commitment to building workforce models that are not only innovative, but sustainable and fair.
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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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