AI Video Editing Startup Captions Acquires Digital Canvas Platform Alpaca

AI video creation and editing startup Captions, whose offerings include automated subtitles and dubbing, has acquired “AI-powered digital canvas” platform AlpacaML.

Captions’ first-ever acquisition closes out a year of milestones, including hitting more than 10m global creators, who created more than 3m videos, and growing the New York-based team from 15 to 60 employees. 

The company raised USD 60m in Series C funding back in July 2024. The round was led by Index Ventures — which happens to also have been an investor in Alpaca — with participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and Jared Leto were among the new investors. 

According to a press release, this round brought total capital raised to over USD 100m and valued the company at USD 500m.

Now-CEO Gaurav Misra and COO Dwight Churchill started working on a social network in 2021, but decided to shift their focus to video creation and editing — and Captions was born.

Misra, an ex-Microsoft engineer, told Axios that Captions has only spent about USD 10m so far, thanks to revenue from its app, which has been downloaded more than 10 million times with more than 100,000 daily active users. 

Misra said that the goal is to invest USD 100m into training Captions’ foundation model, a process that is expected to continue through 2025.

Text + Visuals

Alpaca, founded in 2022, markets its platform as being built specifically for “digital artists and creatives,” capable of “instantly” stylizing and rendering early concept sketches.

Users can choose from a tiered subscription plan, which includes a free level that provides up to 100 generations per day, with the caveat that user data may be used for internal improvements. Prior to the acquisition, Alpaca raised USD 4.2m in seed funding, also led by Index Ventures. 

“The acquisition of AlpacaML will allow us to continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with generative video,” Misra explained in a November 13, 2024 post on X.

Alpaca CEO William Buchwalter will join Captions as a research engineer; Captions also extended job offers to all six of Alpaca’s employees. 

Drew Jaegle, a former DeepMind research scientist, has joined Captions as Head of AI. The company also has nearly 30 openings on its website, half of which fall under the engineering department, including data scientists. (Interestingly, Churchill noted on X, “more than 10% of the Captions team are former founders.”)

Captions’ most recent launch is Lipdub Playground, released November 20, 2024, which adds voice to AI videos. 

“Just type and watch your character speak the provided script aloud, complete with synced lip movement and body language,” read a blog post introducing the tool. 

Axios coverage noted that Captions is considering more acquisitions, with a special interest in machine learning companies well-versed in model training, infrastructure, and inference.

In addition to the vote of confidence from investors in its Series C, Captions has garnered some notable good press, including a mention on Time Magazine’s list of “Best Inventions for 2024” and a New York Times article celebrating the platform’s role in a multilingual love story.