What would you dream of building as an entrepreneur if you had unlimited time and money?
For two India Institute of Technology grads, Ashray Malhotra and Nisheeth Lahoti, who had gone through the pain of closing down their first startup, their answer was simple, but audacious: build a magic box—a magical AI system, which would take any piece of text of input and one day create a Hollywood level movie.
“Imagine having just a computer and not actually have to go out and shoot anything. AI can do everything on your behalf. The idea resonated a lot with me. Because when I was in college, I used to make short films. And as with everybody who's made professional quality videos, you realise the problems associated with that process—anything can go wrong. And very often in our professional quality video that we were shooting, Murphy's Law always applies. So, that's when we started to work on this concept of building that end-to-end text movie engine,” says Ashray Malhotra.
(l-r) Ashray Maholtra, Nisheeth Lahoti and Shivam Mangla, Co-Founders of Rephrase.ai
Malhotra is the co-founder and CEO of Rephrase.AI, who along with his co-founders Nisheeth Lahoti and Shivam Mangla founded the company in Bangalore, India in 2019.The three co-founders were named to the 2021 Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list. Rephrase.ai aims to democratise video, making high-quality video creation capabilities available to companies of all sizes across all industries by providing deep tech, generative AI tools to create professional videos with the ease of writing text.
While starting on what they expected to be long journey to create the AI engine of their dreams, they knew they would need short term, monetizable products. “That's when we actually started to work on building techniques and technology that can create a digital avatar of a person which means a digital copy of a face, digital copy of your voice, and create videos of people looking into the camera and we perfected this technology early last year,” says Malhotra.
It took a few years to get the technology right, but the company now has worked with over 50 large enterprises, including blue chip names like Amazon, Microsoft, Mondelez and Johnson & Johnson with both B2C and B2B use cases. “We’ve created over 50 digital clones of CXOs and some of the largest celebrities across India and U.S. We recently worked with a pharma company where we created avatars of the VP of sales to help her communicate with every single sales rep personally, to help her build a one-on-one relationship with people that she would have loved to build in person but wasn't able to because she was in a distributed remote workforce,” Malhotra.
Rephrase.ai uses a consumption-based SaaS business model. There is a one-time fee to create and set up the platform. Then there is a recurring component of allowing customers to buy credits to create more videos on their own.
At the beginning, the founders were lucky to have early angel investments and backing from Techstars India when they we just building the technology when few people had heard of generative AI. But the magic of their demos and ever-increasing customer list allowed the company to attract $12.2 million in funding to date. Its latest $10.6 million Series A round of funding in September of 2022 was led by Red Ventures. Other investors in this round include Silver Lake, 8VC, and others. An earlier seed round for $1.5 million was raised by Lightspeed and AV8 Ventures.
Malhotra grew up in a small town in India and, like his co-founders, graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. But he never planned to be an entrepreneur. “When I was in college, I used to believe, I would argue like most college kids believe that to build really amazing products you need thousands of people and millions of dollars. But at the MIT Media Labs ReDx camp, I was part of a cross functional team, including data scientists, software, engineers, dentists and businesspeople who in a span of a week built a proof of concept for a toothbrush within which you could put a camera inside that would detect a cavity before it actually became cavities,” says Malhotra. That experience made him believe that a small group of dedicated smart people could do amazing things in a short amount of time. Why not him?
While working on his master’s in engineering, he and Lahoti founded SoundRex in 2016. The company enables wireless transmission of high-fidelity audio at very low latencies through the use of algorithms based around machine learning and human auditory models. The company would fail after two years, but that failure led to the development of Rephase.ai in 2019
As for the future? After focusing on building the platform’s business communications capabilities beyond the enterprise to companies of all sizes over the next five years, beyond that “you want to be able to build this engine where I see every person on the internet having a digital clone and being able to create a professional quality video of a level which they do not have access to today,” concludes Malhotra.
