Kaltura acquires eSelf, founded by creator of Snap’s AI, in $27M deal

Kalturaa New York-based AI video platform company, acquires eSelf.aian Israel-based startup behind conversational avatars – AI-generated digital humans that can talk to users – for around $27 million. Kaltura today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire eSelf, a platform that supports more than 30 languages ​​and includes an easy-to-use studio for creating, customizing and deploying photorealistic digital avatars.

Co-founded in 2023 by CEO Alan Bekker – who previously sold his first startup, Voca, to Snap in 2020 – and CTO Eylon Shoshan, eSelf brings deep technical expertise in speech-to-video generation, low-latency speech recognition, and screen understanding, allowing avatars to see and respond to what’s on a user’s screen. The eSelf co-founders will join Kaltura to oversee the integration of eSelf’s technology into the company, which will also include all current eSelf employees.

The two-year-old startup has a small but mighty team of about 15 AI experts, Ron Yekutiel, co-founder and CEO of Kaltura, told TechCrunch. He noted that Bekker’s former company specialized in natural language processing, which helps computers understand human speech, and in computer vision, saying it was a “very leading company in conversational speech bots. And so he is an expert [in this field]and that’s what we bought,” Yekutiel said.

Kaltura offers a range of cloud-based software solutions designed for advanced video applications, including an enterprise video portal that resembles a private YouTube, tools for webinars and virtual events, and integrations that embed video education into university learning management systems, or platforms that host online courses.

The Nasdaq-listed company also provides products for virtual classrooms and end-to-end TV streaming solutions. Kaltura’s video platform serves more than 800 enterprise customers, helping them engage users across sales, marketing, customer service, education and entertainment. Customers include technology giants such as Amazon, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Adobe and IBM, as well as leading banks, insurance companies, consultancies, pharmaceutical companies and universities in the US.

Kaltura plans to integrate eSelf.ai’s virtual agent technology into its video offering; The integration aims to enable agents to listen, speak and interpret user screens in real time.

“This acquisition was so strategic. We were actively evaluating multiple companies to find the right fit. We determined they were a fit [eSelf] were best-in-class for real-time, synchronous conversations – not just video-on-demand lip sync – and that they had impressive speech-to-text and text-to-speech technology,” Yekutiel said in an interview with TechCrunch. “In addition to the technology, there was also strong cultural and geographic alignment, which was critical for us.”

Why a video company is betting on conversational avatars

Over the past two decades, companies have primarily used video to stream, upload, and manage content. But that is changing quickly. Thanks to AI, videos can now be generated on the fly – hyper-personalized and contextual – giving each viewer their own customized experience, tailored to exactly what they need at that moment, Yekutiel explains.

“We started with video and then moved to personalized video, and now with eSelf’s technology we are adding human-like capabilities – faces, eyes, mouths, ears – to make our AI agents talkative and expressive,” said Yekutiel.

Kaltura is evolving from a video platform to a video-based provider of customer and employee experiences, where video acts as an interface. Unlike most avatar companies that only provide a ‘face’, it delivers the entire workflow: avatar, intelligence and business-related knowledge. The focus isn’t just on streaming video; it delivers measurable business results and ROI, the CEO added.

The company plans to launch standalone, embeddable agents for sales, marketing, customer support and training, among others. Target sectors include education, media and telecom, e-commerce, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

Asked about media reports While saying Kaltura was exploring a sale or merger at a valuation of $400 million to $500 million, Yekutiel told TechCrunch that Kaltura has been exploring opportunities at a range of companies, including potential “acquisitions, mergers with companies of similar size and connections to some larger players.” But it never came close to a transaction like the one being reported, he said. He also pointed to Kaltura’s recent acquisitions, including its fourth company, as evidence of the company’s continued commitment to its current strategy.

This is Kaltura’s fourth acquisition to date. The company acquired cloud TV solution Tvinci in 2014, followed by Rapt Media in 2018 and video conferencing platform New row in 2020. eSelf’s most recent funding round was the $4.5 million announced in December 2024.

Kaltura, which went public in 2021, has revenue of about $180 million, is profitable on an adjusted EBITDA and cash flow basis, and has about 600 employees.