Kaltura Acquires Eself, Founded By Creator Of Snap’s Ai, In $27m Deal

Kaltura, a New York-headquartered AI video level company, is acquiring eSelf.ai, an Israel-based startup down conversational avatars — AI-generated integer humans that tin talk pinch users — for astir $27 million. Kaltura announced coming that it has signed a definitive statement to get eSelf, a level supporting much than 30 languages and featuring a user-friendly workplace for creating, customizing, and deploying photorealistic integer avatars.

Co-founded successful 2023 by CEO Alan Bekker, who antecedently sold his first startup, Voca, to Snap successful 2020 — and CTO Eylon Shoshan, eSelf brings heavy method expertise successful speech-to-video generation, low-latency reside recognition, and surface understanding, which allows avatars to spot and respond to what’s connected a user’s screen. The eSelf co-founders will subordinate Kaltura to oversee nan integration of eSelf’s exertion into nan company, pinch each existent eSelf labor coming connected committee arsenic well.

The two-year-old startup has a mini but beardown squad of astir 15 AI experts, Ron Yekutiel, co-founder and CEO of Kaltura, told TechCrunch. He noted that Bekker’s erstwhile institution specialized successful earthy connection processing, which helps computers understand quality speech, and machine vision, saying it was a “very starring institution successful nan area of conversational reside bots. And truthful he’s an master [in this field], and that’s what we bought,” Yekutiel said.

Kaltura offers a suite of cloud-based package solutions designed for precocious video applications, including a firm video portal akin to a backstage YouTube, devices for webinars and virtual events, and integrations that embed video learning into assemblage learning guidance systems, aliases platforms that shape online coursework.

The Nasdaq-listed institution besides delivers virtual schoolroom products and end-to-end TV streaming solutions. Kaltura’s video level serves complete 800 endeavor customers, helping them prosecute users crossed sales, marketing, customer care, education, and entertainment. Its clients see tech giants for illustration Amazon, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Adobe, and IBM, arsenic good arsenic starring banks, security companies, consulting firms, pharmaceutical companies, and universities successful nan U.S.

Kaltura plans to merge eSelf.ai’s virtual supplier exertion crossed its video offerings; nan integration intends to alteration agents that tin listen, speak, and construe personification screens successful existent time.

“This acquisition was truthful strategic. We were actively evaluating aggregate companies to find nan correct fit. We wished that they [eSelf] were best-in-class for real-time, synchronous speech — not conscionable video-on-demand lip-syncing — and that they had an awesome speech-to-text and text-to-speech exertion stack,” Yekutiel said successful an question and reply pinch TechCrunch.  “Beyond nan technology, location was besides a beardown taste and geographic alignment, which was captious for us.”

Why a video institution is betting connected conversational avatars

For nan past 2 decades, businesses person mostly utilized video for streaming, uploading, and managing content. But that’s changing fast. Thanks to AI, videos tin now beryllium generated instantly — hyper-personalized and contextual — giving each spectator their ain civilization experience, tailored precisely to what they request successful that moment, Yekutiel explained.

“We started pinch video, past moved to personalized video, and now, pinch eSelf’s technology, we’re adding human-like capabilities — faces, eyes, mouths, ears — to make our AI agents conversational and expressive,” Yekutiel said.

Kaltura is evolving from a video level into a video-based customer and worker acquisition provider, wherever video serves arsenic nan interface. Unlike astir avatar companies that connection only a “face,” it delivers nan afloat workflow—avatar, intelligence, and enterprise-connected knowledge. The attraction isn’t conscionable streaming video; it’s driving measurable business results and ROI, nan CEO added.

The institution plans to motorboat standalone, embeddable agents for uses including sales, marketing, customer support, and training. Target sectors see education, media and telecom, e-commerce, financial services, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals.

Asked astir media reports saying Kaltura was exploring a waste aliases merger astatine a $400 cardinal to $500 cardinal valuation, Yekutiel told TechCrunch that Kaltura has explored opportunities pinch a scope of companies, including imaginable “acquisitions, mergers pinch likewise sized firms, and connections pinch immoderate larger players.” But it ne'er sewage adjacent to a transaction for illustration nan ones being reported, he said.  He besides pointed to Kaltura’s caller acquisitions, including its 4th company, arsenic grounds of nan company’s continued committedness to its existent strategy.

This marks Kaltura’s 4th acquisition to date. The institution acquired unreality TV solution Tvinci successful 2014, followed by Rapt Media successful 2018, and video conferencing level Newrow successful 2020. eSelf’s astir caller backing information was its $4.5 cardinal announced successful December 2024. 

Kaltura, which went nationalist successful 2021, is astir $180 cardinal successful revenue, profitable connected an adjusted EBITDA and rate travel basis, and has astir 600 employees.