34-year-old CEO bet on AI video 5 years before ChatGPT—convincing Mark Cuban to invest was

This story is part of CNBC Make It's The Moment series, where highly successful people reveal the inflection point that changed the trajectory of their lives and careers. He needed funding for his business, and when he told startup investors that AI would revolutionize.

In his email, Tjerrild promised to "keep it short," according to a partial screenshot reviewed by CNBC Make It, and sent Cuban a demo of the product they were building — at the time, the co-founders wanted Synthesia to "make a Hollywood film from.

What Happened

That proved a prescient priority when the company's initial business model essentially flopped, and Synthesia spent four months trying to build a new product aimed at an entirely different type of customer. Even after that new product showed promise, Synthesia remained deliberate.

• In 2017, when Riparbelli co-founded his London-based startup Synthesia — an "AI video platform for business" that helps corporate workers quickly create training videos and presentations with AI avatars and text-to-video tools — ChatGPT's.

• Today, startup investors flock to AI companies, which received 61% of global venture capital funding in 2025, according to a report from the Paris-based intergovernmental Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

• Within the enterprise sector, only 39% of companies have reported AI usage having a measurable impact on their earnings, according to a November 2025 McKinsey report.

Key Details

"There's nothing easier than coming up with 20 reasons for why you shouldn't do something," the CEO says. Here's how Riparbelli spent Cuban's investment, why the business struggled under the bright Hollywood lights, and how Synthesia found a less glamorous audience to.

• Yet businesses' spending on generative AI tools increased to $37 billion in 2025, up from from $11.5 billion in 2024, according to a December 2025 report from Menlo Ventures.

• Riparbelli, Synthesia's CEO, declined to share his company's annual revenue, but it has corporate clients including PepsiCo, Mondelez and Heineken, according to a company spokesperson — and was most recently valued at $4 billion.

• Yet the industry's current popularity among investors didn't help Riparbelli back in 2017.

Why It Matters

As funding dwindled, Synthesia's few clients kept the company "afloat," says Riparbelli. But being early to the AI era left the company in limbo, he says: The technology simply couldn't create Hollywood-level quality video on a scale to justify his initial vision.

• Synthesia's survival came down to a cold email that co-founder and current COO Steffen Tjerrild sent in 2017 to former "Shark Tank" investor judge Mark Cuban.

• Cuban responded within five minutes, and the emails exchanged over the ensuing 14 hours led him to invest $1 million in a deal that valued Synthesia at $5 million, according to the company.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Synthesia used the $1 million investment to hire engineers and build a product — which aimed to dub new dialogue onto existing video and translate it into other languages — that film studios ultimately.

• By 2020, the company had sent its virtually dubbed demos around to plenty of companies, and some of them started asking if Synthesia could use AI to create quick, inexpensive corporate training videos and.

• Continued reporting by CNBC as more details emerge