Gaurav Misra On Raising $100 Million To Develop AI-Powered Tools For Video Editing And Creation

In the AI industry, where innovation evolves at lightning speed, some founders set the pace by combining a unique cultural perspective with a relentless drive to create groundbreaking technology. Gaurav Misra, founder and CEO of Captions, is one of these visionaries.

Captions has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Jared Leto.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Gaurav Misra’s journey reflects the power of resilience, adaptability, and cultural diversity in shaping successful tech entrepreneurship.
• Early exposure to programming and a bicultural background set the foundation for Gaurav’s innovative approach in AI.
• Experience at Snapchat taught Gaurav the importance of blending engineering with design for market-driven product innovation.
• Finding product-market fit is challenging but essential; Gaurav’s persistence led to a pivotal shift to a subscription model for Captions.
• Building strong professional networks is crucial, as Gaurav’s relationships proved instrumental in securing VC funding.
• Captions’ success highlights the growing demand for AI-driven video tools that empower creators to tell impactful stories.
• For founders, understanding all aspects of a company—engineering, marketing, sales—is key to steering it effectively toward growth.

 

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About Gaurav Misra:

Gaurav Misra is the co-founder and CEO of Captions, the leading AI research company focused on video generation and editing. He has an extensive background in engineering, design, and machine learning.

Prior to co-founding Captions, Gaurav led Design Engineering at Snap, where he oversaw the development of new social products such as Spotlight and Snap Map.

Connect with Gaurav Misra:

• LinkedIn
• TheOrg
• Crunchbase
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMakers show. So today we have an amazing founder. You know, we’re going to be talking about building, scaling, financing. You know, in their case, they’ve raised 100 million.

Alejandro Cremades: They have about 60 employees and they’re doing some really good stuff in the AI space. um But again, you know, brace yourself for impact because this one is going to be inspiring. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Gaurav Mishra.

Alejandro Cremades: Welcome to the show.

Gaurav Misra: Thank you. Excited to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally you were born in the US, but then at four, you know, you’re assaulted. Sounds like your parents wanted to pack the bags to go to Delhi. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Gaurav Misra: Yeah, I mean, honestly, like at four, I don’t even remember being in the US, right? Like, i my earliest memories are actually in India. And if my parents hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t even know that I was actually born in the U.S.

Gaurav Misra: But it was one of the most important things that probably happened to me just because the birthright citizenship, I was able to get citizenship from the beginning, able to come back later on, helped me quite a bit. And I think for my parents, it was a matter of my dad was doing his Ph.D.

Gaurav Misra: in the U.S. He He completed. completed his PhD and they wanted to head back to India, you know be with family and stuff.

Gaurav Misra: So it made a ton of sense.

Alejandro Cremades: So then tell us about how did you get into the whole computer thing?

Gaurav Misra: Yeah, honestly, it’s something I was interested in from the very beginning. And you know even from the early ages, like I was programming maybe when I was like you know eight ten years old really excited about you know my me and my brother used to play a lot of games so we would like start getting into making games programming games things like that and that got me like pretty far along in terms of like learning how to be good at you know just making brand new things um you know making things that I can you know show my friends.

Gaurav Misra: they They kind of like it.

Gaurav Misra: They’re like, wow, that’s cool. I can play this game. um And that gave me a lot of joy, you know just like kind of seeing things that I made, showing it to people, and they appreciate it.

Gaurav Misra: And in India, it the culture is a little bit more tilted towards sort of computer science from the beginning. like As opposed to the US, in India, it’s taught right from the beginning. right I think even in like first, second, third grade, you’re already getting into programming on the computer.

Gaurav Misra: And by the time you get to 12th grade, you’re doing like college level and beyond, essentially. So there’s almost like a culture of like, you know, getting kids more involved in computers from the beginning.

Alejandro Cremades: So then in your case, why did you decide to come to the US? Obviously, I know that you came to Boston University, but there’s great universities in in India.

Gaurav Misra: yeah There definitely are. And I think part of the reason for me was that, you know, just knowing that I am an American citizen, I was always curious about what America is like.

Gaurav Misra: I had never even been. I’m honestly, you know, besides sort of being born in the U.S., like I never actually came back once going to India. And I was really curious about what it’s like.

Gaurav Misra: I i only knew things from what my parents told me. And I really like the idea of a place where you know it’s a meritocracy.

Gaurav Misra: you know You can really, anyone can make it. like All those types of ideas that you see in the movies like really appeal to me. And that’s what got me really excited about coming back to the US. I think the problem was I didn’t really know like any better of which city, which college.

Gaurav Misra: like If you told me like Boston, New York, like they all sounded the same to me. So I went with what my parents told me. They said Boston’s great. It’s the place you want to be. It’s where students go most of the time.

Gaurav Misra: And I applied to probably tons of colleges. I would say maybe 20, 30 of them. Got into a lot of them, but ended up choosing Boston University because it felt like the right balance of like academics and sort of more holistic education

Alejandro Cremades: So then talk to us about, you know, coming here to the U.S. and and really, you know, experiencing, you know, the because, I mean, Boston in is an incredible place, you know, a lot of ah young people, you know, great universities. So I’m sure that that day gave you kind of like the the feel to be like, hey, you know, like maybe maybe, you know, I want to get into this whole venture, you know, world, you know, eventually.

Gaurav Misra: totally i think like you know living in india i was never exposed to you know some of the things that i got exposed to when i came to Boston University. um But like culturally, like I’ll give you an example.

Gaurav Misra: right when i When I joined BU, it was 2008. Obama had just gotten elected. right I think there was like celebrations happening on the street. There was like the type of energy of, like wow, like anyone can come here, anyone can make it, right which got me really excited.

Gaurav Misra: um And it kind of gave me a new perspective of like it’s not just about you know writing the code and programming and making something, but how do you go beyond that?

Gaurav Misra: you How do you like sell this to people? How do you like you know grow your user base, make something that people want to share with other people? And that’s that’s part of what I got to learn actually through that process.

Alejandro Cremades: so then So then, talk to us about getting into, for example, with Snapchat, because that was a pivotal you know moment you know and the segue before you became a founder. So how was how was that journey with Snapchat for you?

Gaurav Misra: Yeah, I mean, so for me, I was always interested in machine learning. It’s something I studied at Boston University as well and did a bunch of work at many different companies along the way, many startups and stuff around like machine learning infrastructure and different types of like machine learning training and inference and things like that.

Gaurav Misra: And Snapchat was exciting to me because they were one of the first companies that was doing things with you know video and images that weren’t being done before.

Gaurav Misra: like A lot of the machine learning at the time was for things like, oh, like let’s look at like a sales lead and figure out whether it’s like a high likelihood to convert or a low likelihood to convert, right like which is interesting.

Gaurav Misra: It’s an interesting problem. But Snapchat was doing stuff like, hey, like let’s morph the face and make it look like older or a younger person. you know It’s just completely different. And it’s more like a consumer, sort of like anybody can look at that and appreciate that.

Gaurav Misra: I think the sales lead stuff is cool, but like probably the average person would be like, h I don’t know what you do with that exactly. um And so that’s really what got me excited. When I joined Snap, it was 2016, so it was just before the IPO, but the energy was as if it was like a brand new startup.

Gaurav Misra: Like if you look at you know how they were operating at the time, wow, it was just like truly you know as if it was a one or two year old startup basically. like Everything was very do it yourself.

Gaurav Misra: The energy was very much like innovation first.

Gaurav Misra: right like It wasn’t even like at the stage where people were thinking about maintenance and like sort of like protecting the turf that they built out essentially, but really more like let’s build something new, or something amazing.

Gaurav Misra: And that was always like kind of you know the the the drive of the company basically at that time.

Gaurav Misra: And so yeah, that’s what got me really excited about Snapchat. so that also was how i ended up moving to new york at that time

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about the you you know eventually thinking, hey, you know like maybe it makes sense for me to really do something about this and and start a company on my own, which happened eventually in February 2021.

Gaurav Misra: yeah i mean that was a whole journey because like at snapchat I had a whole transition that kind of happened through, you know, I joined as an engineer, you know, built a bunch of different products.

Gaurav Misra: And through the process of being at Snapchat, you know and being an early company, at some point I got you know a chance to meet the CEO there, um you know and he liked some of the work that I was doing, which got me involved in their design team, which was a team of people really thinking about innovation and like how to develop new products at Snapchat.

Gaurav Misra: And that got me really excited too. So thinking about how we can put together design and engineering to like focus on innovation and building new products was one of my main goals at the in the last two years that I was there at Snapchat.

Gaurav Misra: So I built out that team, um and our focus was developing new products, figuring out whether they work or not, and finding that product market fit.

Gaurav Misra: right And so we were able to develop you know dozens and dozens of these different products and prototypes that we would test and try to find product market fit in different areas that Snapchat would want to expand into.

Gaurav Misra: um Over the course of this, like many things were playing out at the same time. like TikTok as a platform was taking off 2019 for the first time. People were just like, you would see, I think people were logging into TikTok at that time, and it was just a bunch of people dancing.

Gaurav Misra: And people were like, what is this? like Is this like is this a joke? like Is this a real platform? This is just a fad? But the reality was that there was something deeper happening underneath all the dancing.

Gaurav Misra: like People were also telling stories, talking, you know sharing ideas. And it was kind of becoming the town square in a way that had never been possible before, right where like personality actually comes through.

Gaurav Misra: It’s not just of a text written on a text-only platform like Reddit or Twitter or something like that. right But for the first time, you could see the person. You could see, like oh, I understand what type of person this is.

Gaurav Misra: like I can relate to this person based on how they’re talking and who they are. right And that was kind of transformational. really I think people weren’t realizing it at that time. And I think Snapchat saw that. you know Snapchat was early to the short video game in a way.

Gaurav Misra: It’s not the same type as TikTok, but people were recording videos and sending them to each other on Snapchat way earlier than TikTok came along. But TikTok kind of pioneered that you know public sort of sharing of these types of short videos and kind of the entertainment angle to them almost, right?

Gaurav Misra: So that’s some of the stuff that we were seeing at the time. And I was actually working at Snapchat on developing Spotlight, which was like their response product, essentially, to TikTok.

Gaurav Misra: And about like what the advantages that TikTok had at that time were were pretty significant and like how Snapchat differentiates and builds something unique in that space right without directly competing with something like TikTok that’s growing very rapidly so that was some of the stuff that I was working on and as part part of that, I was able to learn a lot about like the video space and kind of how it’s evolving.

Gaurav Misra: And seeing that you know video is, and at that time, it was one of the fastest growing mediums.

Gaurav Misra: And if you were looking at like metrics, like Snapchat internally, I’ll tell you, was you know TikTok was running ads actually on Snapchat to acquire users.

Gaurav Misra: So they were running probably $100 million dollars a month or something like that.

Gaurav Misra: So a very large number. right And there was concern of like, is this cannibalizing like Snapchat? Is this like eating up user engagements from Snapchat? And there were tests run to make sure that that was wasn’t the case.

Gaurav Misra: And in the short term, it wasn’t. But if you look at the long run, it was eating up everything. like Essentially it was eating up not just all the other social media platforms, but anything else that people do during the day.

Gaurav Misra: It was that engaging, it was that like almost addicting to to an extent. And I think through that process is how I was able to learn about like the growth of this new new content type, which were you know we we started calling talking videos, right?

Gaurav Misra: Videos where people are talking and they’re telling stories, they’re sharing ideas, whatever it might be.

Gaurav Misra: And that’s kind of what got me excited about the idea of a company that’s focused purely on that. And that’s how CaptionSource came to be.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess for the people that are listening to Get It, what ended up being the business model of captions how do you guys make money

Gaurav Misra: Yeah, so we had a bit of a story of how we got to it. But today, the business model is purely subscription. So we’re a consumer subscription business. We mostly cater to like consumers, prosumers.

Gaurav Misra: We also have some enterprise customers as well. But our bread and butter is sort of the long-held consumer.

Alejandro Cremades: up being the business model of captions? How do you guys make money? What was that moment where you guys were like, I think that the we’re into something here when you hit the product market fit?

Gaurav Misra: Yeah, it was ah it was a process for sure. So like when we started the company, you know we were thinking maybe we need to yeah we we want to make a social network. So we were excited about the talking video idea, but we were thinking, okay, maybe we want to make actually something where you can share talking videos and where you can like respond to them.

Gaurav Misra: and It’s actually more of a network situation. And we thought maybe, you know since it’s kind of a marketplace, we should start with the you know creation side.

Gaurav Misra: And then once we have creation sort of figured out, we can get consumption or distribution after that.

Gaurav Misra: um But it kind of didn’t work out that way. like I think the creation really hit it off. and The moment we launched the app, it was an instant hit, essentially.

Gaurav Misra: But after as we were trying to build the consumption side, it turned out to be much harder than we had expected. And I think over the course of trying to figure that out, we got distracted, we were building other apps, various different types of apps.

Gaurav Misra: And you know, it can be like a pretty difficult process, because like, if you think about like, all the things in life that are challenging, you know, the normal things that we do, I’m not even talking about the abnormal, but like something like running a marathon or like learning a language or something like that, right?

Gaurav Misra: You kind of have a very clear, you know, end state that you can get to. So for example, you know, I’m learning a language, but I can say three sentences now or something like that.

Gaurav Misra: right I can understand what people are saying every once in a while, and as I practice more, I get better and better.

Gaurav Misra: I can i can see the progress. you know Similarly, with the running a marathon, like today I’m running two miles, tomorrow I’m running three miles, right and you can see the progress happening.

Gaurav Misra: I think the problem with product market fit is that it’s one of those things that you don’t ever make any progress on until you do. So you can spend one year, two years, three years, five years doing it and not be any closer than you were when you started.

Gaurav Misra: And I think that’s what makes it like one of the most draining, one of the most difficult types of problems to solve because you don’t see progress until you do. And sometimes you’ll look at other people and say, hey, they spent one day on it and it worked, right?

Gaurav Misra: And there’s nothing special about what they did. They were just lucky or you know somehow you know hit the right thing at the right time. And then you might spend five years on it and be no closer than on day one.

Gaurav Misra: right And I think that’s like one of the hardest things about it. But I think that’s why keeping that mindset of like you’re not doing it to achieve product market fit, you’re doing it to build great product and to get something amazing in front of customers and getting the joy and in enjoying that journey I think is really important.

Gaurav Misra: right And at the end of the day, limited runway, limited time, taking as many shots as possible, not getting tied down to like one idea, being able to change the idea, think about like what more we could do.

Gaurav Misra: And that’s what we were spending our time doing that entire first year. We were evolving captions from what it was and seeing where we can find the PowerParket fit. But eventually what happened was we did find PowerParket fit in a slightly different product.

Gaurav Misra: It was actually a photo sharing product.

Gaurav Misra: And we were thinking about at that time, should we shut down captions? Because it was costing us money. It was costing about $10,000 a month. And we were thinking, let’s shut it down so we don’t have to spend this extra $10,000 a month and what ended up happening was I remember going back and I was going to delete the captions project essentially and I thought like it just felt wrong when I was just about to do it ah just for the sake of like we’ve put in so much work into this I don’t want to like I want to keep it around, I just want to delete it.

Gaurav Misra: And I had an idea of like, okay, instead of deleting it, I’ll just throw a paywall on the front of it to just like throw $10 a month, just like you can’t even open the application without first paying, the worst user experience, you know.

Gaurav Misra: um And that way, if no one pays for it, it’s essentially shut down. But if people will pay for it, then it’s not costing us anything because they’re paying for themselves.

Gaurav Misra: So I built that in two or three hours, put it on the application, and then we forgot about it. And then we came back six months later, I was checking my bank account, and there was $500,000 in there, which was all actually coming from captions.

Gaurav Misra: And that was the moment where we thought, wow, we have to make a decision of what we want to work on, because this thing is actually working. The reason I hadn’t checked it is because it was on my personal account.

Gaurav Misra: And I wasn’t checking that, you know. And the company account was the new product we’re working on. So we thought about it for a couple of weeks and we decided to go with captions because we were really excited about, like it aligned much better with the original vision of what we were trying to do.

Gaurav Misra: And we were really excited about the video space and the AI space, which is exactly where captions lands, right? And it turned out to be the right bet, because not maybe six to eight months after that, GPT came out and sort of the AI revolution began, which just immediately shortened what we thought would be like a 10-year roadmap into a two-year roadmap in like a blink of an eye.

Gaurav Misra: And I think that was just pure luck, obviously, but the timing turned out to be perfect.

Alejandro Cremades: So then I guess, you know, in this case, you know, you guys have raised a hundred million dollars. So how has it been to going through the journey of raising money

Gaurav Misra: Yeah, I think honestly, parts of it we got lucky at the right times. I think parts of it is, um you know, building the right network from the beginning.

Gaurav Misra: It’s not something I was actively doing, but it kind of happened behind the scenes. I think some of the things that helped me, especially in the beginning, like in the first round, the seed round, um you know, we were able to raise money in the seed round, I think mainly because the timing was right.

Alejandro Cremades: to going through the journey of raising money you

Gaurav Misra: Again, it was 2021. So the market was a little bit looser in terms of like the ability to raise money. People were kind of, you know, ah more open with the zero interest rate situation happening.

Gaurav Misra: So people were more open to just like doing rounds without too much, you know, to show.

Gaurav Misra: Not that that’s what we were trying to do. We had a product to show. And I do recommend it. I think like having a product to show is like probably fundamental. Without that, like it’s hard for someone, especially a VC to be able to tell like, is this person all talker?

Gaurav Misra: Can they actually do something, right? And I think that helped us quite a bit. But the reality is, what helped us the most is, over the years, I had just kept in touch with every company, the people that I’ve worked with, the CEOs and executives of those companies, and just made a good impression of those people, and kept in touch with them, who ended up being great references for me, right and pulling them in to be you know jump on a call and kind of you know just give me a reference on a VC I’m talking to who can talk to them and ask questions and understand like who I am actually made quite a big of a difference and I think like for seed investors a lot of times they’re betting on the person right so the more signal they can get on like who this person is and how do they work, how they operate, right the better it is.

Gaurav Misra: I think one of the most helpful was Snap’s co-founder also kind of jumped on a call for me.

Gaurav Misra: And I think that probably made the biggest difference, especially in the beginning. But all that was just a matter of like years and years of relationship building and delivering you know great results and trying my best to impress people and make sure that I’m doing my part as well as I can.

Gaurav Misra: I think that played a big role. so I think besides that, probably having a product, having something you can show demonstrably, you know I think those things played a big role as well.

Gaurav Misra: um I think throughout after that it gets more and more complicated because you know as you know there’s just many more variables involved. Obviously the success of the product and stuff is a pretty significant factor in being able to raise additional rounds, but a lot of it also comes down to being able to tell a great story.

Gaurav Misra: I think there has to be a decision that needs to be made at some point. is like Where is the end state of this company?

Gaurav Misra: but like how What is the the massive outcome? right Because for a VC-backed company, you have to be able to see a vision which is transformative, right like almost like societal transformation.

Gaurav Misra: right And if that vision is invisible, you’re going to have a hard time raising money because people and you need to be able to be inspired.

Gaurav Misra: I think a lot of times people think of like fundraising as like asking for permission from somebody, but it’s actually finding people to join you along a journey. right like It’s the same as recruiting.

Gaurav Misra: It’s exactly like hiring employees, right where you have to inspire someone to be able to see a vision that maybe nobody else believes but and sounds crazy today, but may become a reality and you have conviction in, right?

Gaurav Misra: Same for an employee and same for an investor, right? If you can get them to see that vision, they will come along the journey with you, right? And at the end of of the the day day, everybody who’s involved with the company, like whether it’s a customer, whether it’s a VC or an investor, right whether it’s an employee, whoever it might be, they’re all making a bet on this big idea.

Gaurav Misra: right They’re all along for this journey. And yeah, there helping them see that and vision is like really fundamental

Alejandro Cremades: Now, Now imagine, you know, obviously these investors, they invest in, and obviously the the employees that you have too, as well as customers, they they they really go for the vision, right? And the future that you’re living into. So if you were to go to sleep tonight, Gaurav, and you wake up in a world where the vision of captions is fully realized, what does that world look like?

Gaurav Misra: them see that end vision is really fundamental. So the way I see it, you know we’re in the AI video space. I think the crazy sort of future that we are imagining is you know a world in which video is just generated by default.

Gaurav Misra: right like Whether you’re making a podcast or whether you’re making TikTok videos, whether you’re making ads, movies, you know, whether you’re making educational content, sales, marketing content, whatever it is, like, the combined value of all this, like, is massive, right?

Gaurav Misra: Like, all of that, by default, people think, oh, of course, we would generate it. That’s how we would do it. That’s the normal way to do it. And maybe some people for fun sometimes like record videos because they’re cool or something like that, right?

Gaurav Misra: Or maybe they like buy records and record videos or I don’t know. But I think generally we’re imagining a world in which video generation is the norm, right?

Gaurav Misra: And what does that world look like? So for us, like that is the transformational change on top of which we’re trying to be build a company.

Gaurav Misra: Like where do we land in that world? Like in that world, we’re a full stack AI company. Like we build a foundation models and we build the user software that actually serves how do you create videos right

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. Now we’re talking about the future here. I want to talk about the past, but doing so with a lens of reflection. So imagine I was to bring you back in time, okay? You know, we’re talking about 2021, early 2021, when you’re thinking about building something of your own. And you have the opportunity of having a chat with your younger self and being able to give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a business oh that b and why given what you know now

Gaurav Misra: you create videos right? Yeah, it’s a good question. I think my main advice would be that it actually, contrary to popular belief, it does help to work in the industry for a while before starting a company.

Gaurav Misra: I think it’s easy to look at like the legendary companies like you know Facebook and things like that, and the founders are like 20 years old, 18 years old, 19 years old, and think that that is the norm and that it should just jump into it immediately.

Alejandro Cremades: launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Gaurav Misra: And yes, that can work sometimes, right? But I think the reality is that the more you can refine your skill set of like understanding how does a company actually work, have a generalist mindset of not just going specific into one thing, but understanding different parts of the company.

Gaurav Misra: you write like How does engineering work? How does data science work? How does marketing work? How does sales work? right Really building out that knowledge, it actually is a big helper, especially when the company starts to work.

Gaurav Misra: You’re able to just you know use your knowledge and your experience to actually drive the company in the right direction right away.

Gaurav Misra: You don’t have to do the learning on the fly. And I think that is a major differentiator. One thing that you’ll notice is about those companies where the founders are like 18, 19 years old and it works out.

Gaurav Misra: I think most of the time the product market fit is so strong in those companies by chance or by design um that no matter how many wrong decisions are made the company can’t be stopped like it just is an unstoppable force right and that’s a lot of that tends to be luck but for most companies like that’s not the case right you can’t actually do a lot of wrong but making wrong decisions.

Gaurav Misra: And so having that experience, I think, actually does count a lot. And it’s something I thought about a lot because I was always thinking about, like is this the right time to start a company?

Gaurav Misra: Is this the right time? Do I have enough experience yet? And I feel like I actually got the perfect amount of experience. like I was very happy with where I landed.

Alejandro Cremades: So Gaurav, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Gaurav Misra: Yeah, I mean, linkedin I think probably is where I’m most most active. X as well, definitely present there as well.

Gaurav Misra: Awesome, great to be here, thank you.

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