CAPTIONS

Gaurav Misra and Dwight Churchill founded Captions in New York in 2021. Misra had worked at Snap, so he knew how creators actually make short video and where the pain was.

The first product was dead simple. Record yourself talking, and the app automatically adds clean, animated captions.

That sounds small. But it solved a real chore for millions of creators, and the app shot up the Apple App Store charts.

That early traction is what convinced the biggest VCs to pile in.

Captions is a subscription app for anyone who makes talking-to-camera video. Creators, marketers, and small businesses pay a monthly fee.

The AI handles the annoying parts. It writes captions, fixes your eye contact so you look at the camera, cuts the dead air, and can even generate AI presenters who read your script.

Free users get a taste. Paying users get the full toolkit.

The bet is that most video in the future gets touched by AI on the way out the door.

The core is the Captions app, with auto-captioning, eye contact correction, and AI-powered editing that trims and polishes a raw recording. There is an AI Creator feature that generates digital presenters to deliver a script without anyone filming anything.

And there is Mirage, the company's own generative video model that creates fully AI-made people speaking on camera. That last one is the big swing.

The growth engine was the App Store itself. The captioning app was genuinely useful and went viral among creators, which pulled in millions of downloads without huge ad spend.

From there Captions kept climbing the value ladder. It moved from captions, to full AI editing, to AI avatars, and then to Mirage, an in-house model that generates video of people from a script.

Each step let it charge more and matter more to its users.

Captions picked the single most brutal fight in tech. Generative video is where OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo, Runway, and a wall of well-funded labs are all spending fortunes.

Captions is a startup trying to build its own foundation model against companies with vastly more money and compute. It bet its entire $100 million on doing the research in-house.

If the giants pull ahead on quality, a startup-sized research budget is a very hard way to keep up.

The investor list reads like a Silicon Valley who's who. Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz co-led the early funding.

Kleiner Perkins led a $25 million Series B in 2023. Then Index Ventures led a $60 million Series C in 2024 at a $500 million valuation, bringing total funding to $100 million.

Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, SV Angel, and actor Jared Leto also chipped in. When that many top firms back a New York app, they are betting on the team as much as the product.