Victor Riparbelli
CEO, Synthesia
“When I saw his research paper for the first time, I just felt like I saw magic. I saw the technology, and I was like: this is going to change everything we know about media production,” says Victor Riparbelli in an interview at Accel Spotlight On. This profound realization, stemming from encountering Matthias Niessner's research, ultimately led Riparbelli to co-found Synthesia in 2017, a company now valued at €2 billion.
“I saw the technology, and I was like: this is going to change everything we know about media production.”
Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia, was selected as one of the 100 most influential people in AI by TIME Magazine in 2024. His journey into technology began with a deep fascination for computers. He initially built websites and e-commerce stores, and later pursued a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Business Informatics in Copenhagen. Before Synthesia, he gained experience in digital strategy, startup acceleration, and emerging technologies like VR/AR and machine learning.
Under Riparbelli's leadership, Synthesia provides an AI-powered platform allowing businesses to create professional videos, featuring artificial avatars, from text in over 50 languages, eliminating costly production setups. Synthesia serves over 50,000 companies, including Reuters, Zoom, and Heineken. While Synthesia's innovative work has dramatically widened the possibilities of AI-generated media, the company is navigating two significant challenges: the potential misuse of its powerful deepfake technology and the burgeoning competition from recently introduced text-to-video models, such as OpenAI’s Sora or Google’s Veo.