HeyGen

HeyGen is an AI video generation platform that enables users to create professional-quality videos with AI-generated avatars and voices. Founded in 2020 by Joshua Xu and Wayne Liang, the company has grown rapidly and raised over $60 million to serve marketing teams, educators, and content creators.

HeyGen's platform allows users to create videos by simply typing a script — the AI generates a realistic talking-head video with a digital avatar, complete with natural lip sync, gestures, and expressions. The platform offers a library of more than 1,100 stock avatars, custom digital twins built from a short recording, and voice cloning with translation across more than 175 languages. Its avatar models are versioned: Avatar III remains the cheap high-volume workhorse, while the newer Avatar V — the fifth generation — captures a person's movement from a 15-second clip and applies it to any still photo, collapsing what used to be a choice between the flexibility of a photo avatar and the realism of a video one. Pricing is denominated in credits rather than video minutes, and the newer models cost roughly seven times more per minute to run. HeyGen's Video Translate feature, which re-dubs an existing video in the speaker's own cloned voice and remaps their lip movements, remains its most distinctive capability for multilingual content.

HeyGen serves enterprise customers for training videos, product demos, and personalized sales outreach, as well as individual creators who need video content without the cost and complexity of traditional video production. The company competes with Synthesia, D-ID, and other AI avatar platforms in the rapidly growing synthetic media market.