Mirage, the maker of the video editing app Captions, has raised $75 million in growth capital from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).
Over the past year, the startup has made major changes to both its product and corporate identity. The startup rebranded from Captions to Mirage to position itself as an AI lab that creates a variety of models and also caters to industries like advertising and marketing. We also trained a model specifically for pacing, framing, and attentional dynamics in short videos.
The company also switched to a freemium model in January 2025 to better compete with apps like ByteDance’s CapCut and Meta’s Edits, which were released later that year. Now, we also offer a video creation suite that includes some of the capabilities of Captions, allowing businesses to create and distribute videos in bulk.
Mirage co-founder and CEO Gaurav Misra said the company aims to develop more models. However, he did not reveal what the next set of models would do, only saying that they would focus on “assembly intelligence,” essentially assembling videos using different sources and components.
Commenting on Mirage’s new audio model, which claims to be able to preserve accents in the videos it generates, Misra said, “We used the audio model because we realized that many of our users are international, so there is a gap in accents. Accent is very important. There was an example of my father. He was trying to use an app and when he said a word in an Indian accent, it always sounded like he was speaking in an American accent.”
Captions have been downloaded more than 3.2 million times in the past 365 days and generated $28.4 million in in-app revenue, according to data from analytics firm AppFigures. Misra said the platform has been used to create more than 200 million videos to date and attracts an international user base, with only 25% of its revenue coming from the United States.
Mirage’s marketing suite is currently available on the web, and Captions primarily offers a mobile-first editing suite. The company aims to integrate these two platforms to better target small and medium-sized businesses looking to create marketing videos.
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Pranav Singhvi, managing director of CVF funds at General Catalyst, said Mirage is a great fit for the product market.
“Mirage’s business equation is very well thought out. They know exactly how to spend those dollars and how to generate a very attractive ROI. If you think about the market they’re going after, it’s an infinitely addressable market in a sense. You can start with the creator world, the influencer world, and use that as a selling mechanism to businesses,” Singhvi told TechCrunch.
There are many companies building AI video generation pipelines for marketing. Canva has introduced several tools for marketing creation and tracking, and platforms like D-ID, HeyGen, Webflow, and Avataar are releasing new models and features.
However, Singhvi seems confident in Mirage’s positioning and unit economics. “Regardless of what the other tools are, Mirage clearly outperforms the competition from a unit economics standpoint. At the end of the day, it’s all a reflection of their product,” he said.
Mirage aims to use the new capital to fuel growth and expand in high-growth Asian markets.
