Mirage, known for its video-editing application Captions, has successfully secured $75 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).
The past year has seen the startup undergo substantial transformations in both its offerings and brand identity. Renaming itself from Captions to Mirage, the company now aims to function as an AI lab developing various models, extending its services to sectors such as advertising and marketing. Furthermore, it has developed a model optimized for the pacing, framing, and attention dynamics of short video content.
In a strategic move to enhance competitiveness against applications like ByteDance’s CapCut and Meta’s Edits (launched later that year), the company adopted a freemium model in January 2025. Additionally, Mirage now provides a comprehensive video-creation suite, incorporating elements from Captions, enabling businesses to generate and disseminate large volumes of videos.
Gaurav Misra, co-founder and CEO of Mirage, revealed the company’s intention to develop additional models. While not detailing the precise functions of these upcoming models, he indicated their focus would be on “assembly intelligence” — essentially the process of constructing videos from various sources and elements.
Discussing Mirage’s new audio model, which reportedly maintains accents in created videos, Misra explained, “We developed the audio model because we identified a deficiency in accent preservation, critical for our extensive international user base. Accents are extremely significant. My own father’s experience illustrated this: when he used the app and spoke a word with an Indian accent, the output consistently rendered it with an American accent.”
Figures from analytics firm Appfigures indicate that Captions garnered over 3.2 million downloads in the past year, generating $28.4 million in in-app revenue. Misra stated that the platform has facilitated the creation of over 200 million videos to date, drawing a global user base, with merely 25% of its revenue originating from the U.S.
While Mirage’s marketing suite is presently accessible via the web, Captions primarily functions as a mobile-centric editing platform. The company intends to integrate these two platforms to more effectively cater to small businesses seeking to produce marketing videos.
Pranav Singhvi, managing director of General Catalyst’s CVF fund, praised Mirage for achieving excellent product-market fit.
Singhvi informed TechCrunch, “Mirage possesses a highly refined business model. They precisely understand how to allocate capital to yield a compelling return on investment. Considering their target market, it represents, in essence, an limitless total addressable market. One can commence within the creator and influencer spheres, subsequently leveraging that foundation to engage enterprise clients.”
Numerous companies are developing AI-powered video generation solutions for marketing purposes. Canva, for example, has launched multiple tools for marketing creation and monitoring. Concurrently, platforms such as D-ID, HeyGen, Webflow, and Avataar have been consistently introducing new models and functionalities.
Nevertheless, Singhvi expressed strong confidence in Mirage’s market standing and unit economics, stating, “Irrespective of competing tools available, Mirage demonstrably leads the industry in terms of unit economics. Fundamentally, this success is a direct result of their product’s quality.”
Mirage plans to deploy the newly acquired capital to stimulate further growth and broaden its presence in burgeoning Asian markets.