- Hungarian text-to-video startup Colossyan raises a $5M Series A round to disrupt the Learning & Development (L&D) industry with its Generative AI solution for managers, educators, and creators.
- The round was led by Bulgarian LAUNCHub Ventures and backed by UK L&D specialist Emerge Education together with participation of previous round’s investors Day One Capital, Oktogon Ventures, and APX.
- Colossyan’s new funding will go towards its AI research and engineering team growth, as well as an expansion of commercial functions in London and New York.
“Generative AI represents a fundamentally new workflow for Learning & Development (L&D) content creation, allowing creators to produce content more efficiently and cost-effectively. We want to make Colossyan the unambiguous leader in this area for video. With this new investment, we plan to prioritize further developing our features, such as our AI Script Assistant (utilizing the power of GPT-3), advanced digital avatar capabilities, and a range of L&D-specific features that our clients have been requesting,” Dominik Kovacs, the CEO and Founder of Colossyan tells The Recursive.
The video creation startup enters a global corporate training market of $350 billion (2021) with forecasts to reach a value of nearly $500 billion by 2028. Hit by the pandemic, the industry has faced a budgetary challenge of a lack of resources and accelerated demand for corporate communication, onboarding, sales enablement, compliance, and other use cases.
Fast and effective learning video production with Colossyan
Hungarian-founded and UK-based Colossyan addresses the issue with its L&D text-to-video digital avatars using the rapidly-evolving Generative AI technology. The startup’s primary product, Colossyan Creator, cuts the production time from 2-3 weeks to less than 30 minutes, saving thousands of dollars per video.
By just entering a script, Colossyan’s AI algorithms generate real-life actors to produce realistic, synthetic videos through an intuitive interface, offering users templates and media library for a smooth experience. Colossyan’s video solution can be applied to presentations, documents, instructions, and marketing messaging to enhance communication and engagement.
“Colossyan Creator has the potential to redefine how professionals work more efficiently through Generative AI,” Stanislav Sirakov, General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures comments.
Launched in 2022, the solution already serves 400 clients in 46 countries, including Procter & Gamble, BMW, and HPE. Colossyan attracts clients due to its particular focus on corporate L&D, recording a substantial growth in recurring monthly revenue of over 30%.
“The level of interest and variety of use cases our customers have found for Colossyan has been incredible. In addition, we’ve received great feedback on additional features they would like to see developed – we’ll be able to do just that with our new investment,” Dominik Kovacs adds.
Initially, the startup was founded in 2018 by a 23-year-old Dominik Mate Kovacs under the name “Defudger” to detect AI-generated content. Throughout the development, however, the team realized their potential of directly enhancing AI-generated content quality and fully moved to content creation.
“In the future, every learning designer will use a text-to-video solution to help build and localize the content they produce. Colossyan is the clear technological leader now and one of the fastest-growing players in this space,” says Jan Lynn-Matern, Founder and Partner at Emerge Education.
