Sometimes you can clone yourself to handle those endless video presentations while you focus on more pressing tasks? Or create versions of yourself that are fluent in multiple languages to reach a global audience?
For businesses, especially those operating in India’s diverse linguistic landscape, video content creation has long been a logistical nightmare — requiring multiple shoots, different presenters for each language, and countless hours of production time.
The costs add up quickly: studios, equipment, talent, not to mention the scheduling headaches of coordinating it all. And there’s the global challenge of maintaining consistency across all these versions, ensuring your message doesn’t get lost in translation.
But what if your customized digital persona could handle all that and more for you?
The sci-fi fantasy is turning into reality with Uttarakhand-based startup Personate.ai, which specializes in creating AI-powered digital personas and video content through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
Co-founded by Akshay Sharma and his brother Rishabh Sharma during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, it allows users to generate videos in minutes using simple text prompts. “You can start making videos even on mobile devices with just a few words,” says Akshay.
Akshay, an IIT Roorkee-trained engineer, is a serial entrepreneur and previously co-founded SCIKEY, an HRtech platform for talent crowdsourcing and recruitment automation, which was doing $7.5 million in annual revenue during his tenure as Chief Marketing Officer.
The company’s initial goal was to create tools to simplify recruiting through AI, but it quickly pivoted to address a more urgent market need: video content production.
“When we spoke to CEOs, we realized that their primary focus was marketing, not recruitment,” explains Akshay. “They wanted to create content using digital humans, and that’s where our journey into video technology began.”
Rishabh Sharma, a former principal researcher at Reliance’s retail tech arm Find and a contributor to ISRO, created the Computer Vision and AI Foundation, which is used to generate AI content.
“His research has been published in prestigious journals such as Cornell’s arXiv and IEEE,” said Akshay. “He worked with AI on groundbreaking use cases like virtual makeup trials and background removal.”
Initially focused on recruiting, the two quickly recognized the potential of AI-generated video content in marketing. They built a digital studio that uses synthetic avatars to create compelling videos at scale.
Personate.ai has attracted a wide range of clients including corporates, government organizations and media houses. Notable collaborations include a partnership with Hindi news channel Aaj Tak, which used Personate’s AI tools to create a digital twin of its flagship anchor. The news channel also created an AI anchor from scratch named Sana, who has also interviewed personalities like Shah Rukh Khan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
It helped Indian state broadcaster Doordarshan create AI anchors that deliver agricultural news and tips to farmers through TV.
The company is bootstrapped, and the founders used their own funding and provided AI consulting services to corporates to sustain them in the early months. “After launching the product within a few months in April 2023, we were self-sustaining from product revenue.” Akshay adds. “We’re also accelerated by AWS MLelevate and Nvidia Inception.”
Synthetic media content
Personate.ai’s platform is a cloud-based tool, and unlike Photoshop, which requires significant manual effort and design expertise, Personate.ai leverages AI to automate the video creation process. Users can create videos by typing a few prompts or selecting pre-designed avatars and scenarios from the preset library.
Personate.ai operates on a SaaS model, offering subscriptions tailored to customer needs. “Our Aadhaar subscription starts as low as Rs 1,000 per month,” reveals Akshay. “For enterprise clients, this can go into the millions depending on the volume and complexity of use cases.” Premium packages include custom synthetic avatars and up to 20 hours of monthly video production.
The platform is also working on expanding its library of avatars, currently at 10, to include different ethnicities and scenarios. “We are building a market with pre-made avatars,” explains Akshay. With all the processing done in the cloud, users can generate videos in as little as five to ten minutes, even from mobile devices.
While synthetic media offers immense possibilities, it also raises ethical concerns. Acknowledging this, Akshay said, “There is always a risk of abuse, be it deepfake or other malicious apps.”
Regulations in the AI space are another thing the company is keeping an eye on to ensure compliance and ethical use.
To address this, Personate.ai uses strict moderation processes, including consent verification for avatar creation and automated content checking. “We are GDPR-compliant and part of initiatives like the Contextual Authentication initiative to ensure ethical AI use,” he adds.
Convincing customers to adopt AI-powered solutions has not always been easy. “Initially, it was difficult for news channels to trust AI anchors,” recalls Akshay. “It took months of demonstrations to gain their trust.” Early adopters were also concerned about how cloning real people would work from an ethical and legal standpoint.
With a lean team of 15 full-time employees and a handful of interns, Personate.ai is gearing up for the next phase of its growth. “We are actively seeking funding and plan to raise over a million dollars to support our B2C launch,” revealed Akshay.
Personate.ai was part of TechSparks 2024, your story’s flagship tech startup event was held in Bengaluru recently, and made it your storyTech30 list as one of the 30 most promising Indian startups of 2024.