Problem

Producing localized or repeatedly edited video is expensive, slow, and traditionally dependent on manual lip editing, reshoots, or training a model for each speaker. sync. targets the gap between globally distributable video and the high production cost of adapting it: the company says its AI lip-sync can reduce work that once took days to minutes, while studios can potentially produce content at a tenth of the cost and ten times faster. The clearest use case is visual dubbing—matching a speaker’s mouth movements to translated audio so films, advertisements, podcasts, games, and creator content feel native in other languages.

A second high-value workflow is “record once, create forever”: creators, studios, and advertisers can change dialogue after filming without reshooting or retraining an avatar. This makes existing footage more reusable and supports video translation, word-level dialogue editing, character re-animation, and realistic AI-generated user-generated content.

Product / Service

sync. labs provides AI video lip-sync and visual-dubbing models through a web studio and an API. Users submit a video plus audio, or a script and voice ID, and receive a finished lip-synced video. Its zero-shot approach works on arbitrary speakers without prior training or fine-tuning, while its style-preservation system learns the speaker’s distinctive mouth movements, helping retain details such as speaking style, skin texture, and teeth. The system also supports multi-speaker videos through active-speaker detection and works with live-action, animated, and AI-generated humans.

The delivery model is usage-based SaaS: customers pay per second of generated video, with subscription tiers adding longer videos, more concurrency, team workspaces, batch API access, voice cloning, text-to-speech integrations, and higher usage discounts. The company supports dubbing into 29 languages and sells to both individual creators and developers or enterprises embedding lip-sync into translation, advertising, editing, and content-generation workflows.

Market

sync. competes in the generative-AI video, AI dubbing, and video-localization infrastructure markets, sitting between creator-facing video tools and enterprise media-production platforms. Relevant alternatives include Rask AI, which offers translation, dubbing, and lip-sync across more than 130 languages; Deepdub, which focuses on premium media dubbing and reports more than 5,000 titles localized; and Captions, which combines translated voiceovers with lip synchronization. sync.’s differentiation is its developer-oriented API, zero-shot style preservation, broad support for arbitrary video content, and positioning as an underlying model layer rather than only a finished localization editor.

The company is active and commercially launched rather than merely pre-product. It was founded in 2023, joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, and reports a 13-person team in San Francisco. Its roots are in the open-source Wav2Lip project, which had more than 10,000 GitHub stars, and the company says thousands of developers already use its models. sync. announced a $5.5 million seed round led by Google Ventures in August 2024, with participation from Y Combinator, Creator Ventures, Rebel Fund, and others. Public materials disclose paid plans and usage pricing, but do not disclose revenue or customer-specific revenue figures.