Mirage and General Catalyst: $75M for Video AI

Mirage and General Catalyst: A Strategic Partnership for Video AI

The startup Mirage recently secured significant funding of $75 million from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. This amount is intended to support the growth of its AI-powered video editing application, Captions. The primary goal of this investment is to develop new models that will enhance the application's capabilities, allowing Mirage to stand out in a competitive market.

With this new financial boost, the total funds raised by Mirage now amount to $175 million. Gaurav Misra, co-founder and CEO of the company, expressed his satisfaction, highlighting that this milestone marks a recognition of the scale and impact of their platform in the market.

A Rapidly Expanding Application

Captions, Mirage's flagship application, has captivated a broad audience with over 20 million users worldwide. This popularity can be attributed to the platform's ability to help its users—whether small businesses, content creators, or marketing teams from large companies like HubSpot, CoreWeave, and King—increasing their audience and online visibility.

The numbers speak for themselves: according to Appfigures, Captions has been downloaded over 3.2 million times in a year, generating $28.4 million in in-app revenue. These statistics reflect the growing appeal of this technology, which has enabled the creation of over 200 million videos. While the audience is predominantly international, a quarter of the revenue comes from the United States.

Competition and Market Positioning

Despite these successes, Captions faces fierce competition, particularly from CapCut, a ByteDance application that dominates the market with over a billion downloads and approximately 323 million monthly active users. By 2025, CapCut had already surpassed 500 million downloads, according to AppTweak.

The Evolution of Mirage

Over the past year, Mirage has undergone significant changes, both in its product and brand image. The startup rebranded from Captions to Mirage to better reflect its ambition of becoming an AI lab. This transformation is accompanied by a diversification of its activities, moving into sectors such as advertising and marketing.

In January 2025, Mirage adopted a freemium model, a strategy aimed at competing with applications like ByteDance's CapCut or Meta's Edits. This offering allows businesses to produce and distribute content at scale while integrating the historical features of Captions.

Innovations and Future Prospects

Gaurav Misra expressed his desire to go further by developing new models, including "assembly intelligence" capable of generating videos from various sources. Mirage is also working on an audio model that better respects accents, a feature requested by its international users.

Currently, Mirage's marketing suite is accessible on the web, while Captions remains primarily mobile-oriented. The company plans to bridge these two environments to better meet the needs of small businesses in video marketing production.

Why General Catalyst is Investing in Mirage

Generative AI has become a major investment sector, with more than half of global venture capital funds in 2025 allocated to AI startups. This trend is fueled by the rapid adoption of AI in strategic sectors like marketing, where 71% of executives plan to increase their investments in generative AI between 2025 and 2027, according to BCG.

Mirage, with its Captions application, addresses this growing need for automated and personalized video content creation. General Catalyst sees in Mirage a perfect alignment between product and market, with effective investment management and significant growth potential.

Furthermore, General Catalyst has shifted its strategy to invest in "applied" technologies, supporting companies that deeply integrate AI to create real value beyond just the product.