Mirage raises $75 million from General Catalyst to develop AI models for video

Mirage, the company behind the AI video editing app Captions, has raised $75 million in a growth round. The investor was General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund — a specialized fund that bets on businesses with proven consumer demand and readiness for scaling. Captions emerged as a response to one of the biggest barriers in video production: post-production consumes more time than the shoot itself.

The app uses language and visual models to automatically add subtitles, correct eye gaze direction in frame, improve audio, and suggest editing variants directly on a smartphone or laptop screen. While a person reads from a script, the model recalculates eye direction in real time so it appears the speaker is looking directly at the camera — this solves a real pain point for creators of educational and business content. The company's rebranding to Mirage is more than just a rebrand.

It reflects a strategic shift: now the company positions itself as a developer of AI models, not just a consumer app. This is an important shift in focus: the AI video market is quickly saturating with tools based on third-party models, and long-term competitive advantage lies precisely in proprietary models tailored to specific use cases. General Catalyst is known for backing companies at pivotal growth moments.

The Customer Value Fund is a mechanism for supporting businesses that have already proven product-market fit. $75 million is a significant sum for a consumer AI startup, especially given that the mobile video editing market is undergoing consolidation. Captions monetizes through subscription, and a sustainable base of paying users gives investors a clear return metric.

The AI video industry right now is one of the most competitive in the consumer technology sector. ByteDance's CapCut dominates mass mobile editing. Adobe is expanding generative capabilities in Premiere and After Effects.

Descript and Runway are competing for the professional segment. Against this backdrop, Captions chose a niche: short vertical videos for content creators, where AI assistance is critical and tolerance for poor editing is minimal. The new round should accelerate development of Mirage's next generation of models.

Following the product's logic, the next step is video generation from text or images directly within Captions, without needing to switch to third-party services. For the AI investment market, this round confirms a trend: money is flowing not only to large foundational models but also to applied products with sustainable audiences. Specialized AI tools for specific content formats prove to be more resilient businesses than universal editors.

General Catalyst confirms interest in consumer AI at a moment when many investors have switched exclusively to the infrastructure B2B layer.