Paris-based Argil raises €4.9 million to develop AI video creation for the creator economy | EU-Startups

Argil, a French AI startup focusing video production, has raised €4.9 million in pre-seed and seed funding to expand its innovative platform for creators, educators, and businesses. The latest round, led by EQT Ventures, builds on an earlier €1 million pre-seed investment from Seedcamp and Axeleo. Other notable investors include YouTuber Kwebbelkop and Charles Gorintin, co-founder of Alan and Mistral AI.

CEO and Co-founder Laodis Menard drew on his experience in product marketing at a French unicorn to develop Argil: “I produced a lot of video content after leading product marketing at a French unicorn. I loved it, but found creating videos was becoming increasingly costly and time intensive. I was also lucky to be confident in front of the camera, a luxury not everyone has. At Argil, we want to democratize the production process to allow anyone to create engaging videos with realistic avatars that bring their original vision to life; AI allows us to do this quickly and cheaply. Demand for video content will continue to grow, and we need novel technology such as AI to fulfill this demand. We’ll make creating an engaging video as easy as writing a tweet.”

Emerging from the Y Combinator incubator, Argil’s mission is to democratise video production with AI-powered tools that make high-quality, personalised content accessible to all. Its platform allows users to create hyper-realistic avatars, trained from uploaded videos, to produce multilingual, ready-to-post videos in minutes. Starting at around €1 per video minute, Argil’s solution addresses the rising demand for video content in today’s creator-driven digital economy.

Argil’s technology offers life-like AI avatars with natural body language and expressions, a contrast, Argil argues, to the robotic avatars commonly used in corporate training. The platform enables creators to convert existing text and audio content into engaging video formats and includes AI-assisted pre-editing tools, captioning, and B-roll integration.

Argil’s technology has already gained traction among YouTubers and even the estates of late celebrities, such as Audrey Hepburn, using the platform to reimagine stars for new audiences.

EQT Ventures Partner Ted Persson highlighted Argil’s potential: “Argil is perfectly positioned to benefit from two megatrends – AI and the creator economy, the latter of which has helped to make synthetic media one of the fastest adopted forms of technology in the past year. We are hugely impressed by the team’s practical experience operating within this field and their ability to pack so much technology into a sleek platform the whole team has enjoyed demoing! We welcome Laodis and Brivael to the portfolio.”

With this funding, Argil plans to scale its operations and refine its platform.