Ever wished you could clone yourself to handle those endless video presentations while you focus on more pressing tasks? Or create versions of yourself speaking fluently in multiple languages to reach global audiences?
For businesses, especially those operating across 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 universal challenge of maintaining consistency across all these versions, ensuring your message doesn’t get lost in translation.
But what if your customised digital persona could handle all that and more for you?
What sounds like a sci-fi fantasy is becoming reality through Personate.ai, an Uttarakhand-based startup that specialises in creating AI-driven 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 within minutes, using simple text prompts. “You can start creating videos with just a few words, even on mobile devices,” says Akshay.
Akshay, an IIT Roorkie-trained engineer, is a serial entrepreneur and had earlier 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 make tools to simplify recruitment through AI but it pivoted swiftly to address a more urgent market need: video content generation.
“When we spoke to CEOs, we realized their primary focus was marketing, not recruitment,” Akshay explains. “They wanted to create content using digital humans, and that’s where our journey into video tech truly began.”
Rishabh Sharma—a former principal researcher at Reliance’s retail tech arm Fynd and a contributor to ISRO—created the computer vision and AI foundation that is used to generate the AI content.
“His research has been published in prestigious journals like Cornell’s arXiv and IEEE,” Akshay shares. “He worked on groundbreaking use cases like virtual makeup trials and background removal with AI.”
Initially focused on recruitment, the two quickly recognized the potential of AI-generated video content in marketing. They built a digital studio that leverages synthetic avatars to create engaging videos at scale.
Personate.ai has attracted a wide range of clients, including corporates, government entities and media houses. Notable collaborations include partnerships with Hindi news channel Aaj Tak, who used Personate’s AI tools to make a digital twin of their lead anchor. The news channel also created an AI anchor from scratch called Sana, who has also interviewed personalities like Shah Rukh Khan and PM Narendra Modi.
It also helped Indian state broadcaster Doordarshan create AI anchors who deliver farming news and tips to farmers via TV.
The company is bootstrapped, and founders used their own funds and provided AI advisory services to corporates to sustain during the initial months. “After the product was launched in April 2023 within a few months, we were self-sustainable from the product revenue.” Akshay adds. “We are 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 a preset library.
Personate.ai operates on a SaaS model, offering subscriptions tailored to client needs. “Our base subscription starts as low as Rs 1,000 per month,” Akshay reveals. “For enterprise clients, it can go up to several lakhs, depending on the volume and complexity of use cases.” Premium packages include custom synthetic avatars and up to 20 hours of video generation monthly.
The platform is also working to expand its library of avatars, currently at 10, to include diverse ethnicities and scenarios. “We’re building a marketplace with pre-created avatars,” Akshay explains. With all processing done on the cloud, users can generate videos even from mobile devices in as little as five to ten minutes.
While synthetic media offers immense potential, it also raises ethical concerns. Akshay acknowledges this, stating, “There’s always a risk of misuse, whether it’s deepfakes or other nefarious applications.”
Regulations in the AI space are another thing the company is keeping an eye on to ensure compliance and ethical usage.
To address this, Personate.ai employs stringent moderation processes, including consent verification for avatar creation and automated content checks. “We’re GDPR-compliant and part of initiatives like the Context Authenticity Initiative to ensure ethical AI usage,” he adds.
Convincing clients to adopt AI-powered solutions hasn’t always been easy. “Initially, getting news channels to believe in AI anchors was tough,” Akshay recalls. “It took months of demonstrations to gain their confidence.” Even early adopters were concerned with how cloning a real person would work out 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 its next phase of growth. “We’re actively seeking funding and plan to raise over a million dollars to support our B2C launch,” Akshay reveals.
Personate.ai was part of TechSparks 2024, YourStory’s flagship tech startup event held recently in Bengaluru, and made it to YourStory’s Tech30 list as one of the 30 most promising Indian startups of 2024.
