From volumetric capture studio to AI unicorn: Synthesia's UK roots

Synthesia was founded in 2017 and became a UK unicorn in 2023. It raised a $180 million Series D at a $2.1 billion valuation in January 2025, then a $200 million Series E at a $4 billion valuation in January 2026. Digital Catapult, the government-backed innovation centre, has now set out how its own early R&D work connected to that growth.

In 2016, Digital Catapult was assessing where the next technical and commercial openings in immersive technology might lie. Volumetric capture was at the frontier, demanding and computationally intensive, and almost absent from UK and European capability. The organisation brought in outside expertise, including Victor Riparbelli, who later co-founded Synthesia and became its chief executive.

That work led to Dimension Studio, launched in 2017 by Digital Catapult with Hammerhead and Microsoft, and opened in 2018. It was described at launch as Europe's most advanced volumetric and 3D capture studio, built on Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture technology. Digital Catapult helped form the partnership, invested £1.5 million and worked with Hammerhead on an operating model combining R&D with a viable commercial business.

The gap was visible in early 2018, when Sir David Attenborough filmed his Hold the World VR feature at Microsoft's studio in Redmond, USA, because no equivalent facility existed in the UK. Dimension's early work included projects with Sky VR, and its clients later spanned entertainment, sport, advertising and live events. Dimension was acquired in 2025 by the UK and US experience agency Journey.

Synthesia was founded in 2017 by Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild, Professor Lourdes Agapito of UCL Computer Science, and Professor Matthias Niessner, now at the Technical University of Munich. Agapito has said the founders met through Digital Catapult, which wanted to build a capture studio in London. Synthesia's own account presents the academic work of Agapito and Niessner, including Niessner's Face2Face project, as foundational.

Public funding also fed into the company's early development. In 2017, Synthesia received Innovate UK support through the HARPC project on high-quality facial capture without head-mounted cameras, alongside Dimension Studios and CAMERA at the University of Bath. The project developed real-time facial performance capture for AR and VR, so that digital characters could be controlled and interacted with live.

In 2018, Synthesia secured further funding for a feasibility study, VISIM, which advanced expressive 3D facial modelling focused on lip dynamics. According to Digital Catapult, this work underpinned the company's ability to scale photorealistic video generation and enter markets such as language dubbing.

Digital Catapult says the Dimension approach, building new technical infrastructure with a high-growth SME and a route to commercial sustainability from the start, informed its later work in advanced media production, human-machine interaction tools and its Technology Access Programmes.