D-ID, the Israeli video production company returning agency to your face through technology that has clients appearing in videos when they shouldn’t (or not), is purchasing Berlin-based Simpleshow, a pioneer in B2B video production services with businesses from Apple and Microsoft on its roster. The price was not disclosed, but the deal instantly widens D-ID’s footprint with large organizations and accelerates its move into interactive avatar-led learning and communications.
Founded in 2008, Simpleshow has raised over $20 million, per its Crunchbase profile, and established a global presence and client base that includes Adobe, Airbus, Microsoft, Bayer, HP, T-Mobile, McDonald’s, eBay and Deutsche Bank. After the deal closes, the new company will work from Berlin, Tel Aviv and across America with some 140 employees.
D-ID, which has raised $60 million to date, said it had funding in place to finance the acquisition. Leadership cast the shift as a move to capture enterprise demand for digital avatars at velocity — to move out of pilots and into scaled training, marketing and internal communications workloads.
Why Simpleshow works for D-ID’s enterprise push
Simpleshow started as an agency that turned complex ideas into simple videos, then morphed into a software platform for businesspeople to create on-brand explainers using templates, storyboarding tools and localization.
That muscle — in workflow, governance and enterprise-grade distribution — complements D-ID’s own strength of creating photorealistic avatars in multiple languages from text.
Strategically, Simpleshow gives D-ID a constructed enterprise channel and more than 1,500 paying customers. For D-ID, which has seen its biggest success with creator-friendly tools and its Creative Reality technology to animate faces and narrators, this is an immediate cross-sell: you can plug avatars into Simpleshow’s ingrained use cases around training and communications without having customers do a complete retooling of what they’ve been doing.
What the combined company looks like after this deal
The combined company will bring its operations across Berlin, Tel Aviv and U.S. hubs, it says, with the purpose of streamlining product and go-to-market strategies. We can expect Simpleshow’s template-based authoring and asset management to live alongside D-ID’s avatar- and voice-crafting technologies as native capabilities within those workflows, serving authors up front rather than relying on third-party editors or VO actors.
The promise for leaders in learning and development is cycle time and cost. A compliance module that used to take presenters, recording studios and localization can be refreshed in hours (with the same, on-brand avatar and AI narration — in dozens of languages). That kind of repeatability is exactly the sort that moves experimental AI into core operations — and profitability closer, according to leadership at D-ID.
Product roadmap: interactive training avatars
After the acquisition, D-ID is hoping to focus on interactive training — videos where an avatar can be paused and asked a question, or the experience diverts into short assessments. Imagine a sales enablement module in which reps can ask a virtual presenter to explain policy minutiae, or a safety course that inserts scenario questions mid-lesson to ensure that certain information was retained.
Though specifics were not shared, the apparent direction will be deeper integration with knowledge bases, real-time Q&A served by large language models and analytics that backfeed LMS outcomes.
Done well, this projects avatars as more than just static rapporteurs to adaptive tutors — an area where enterprises are now playing and hungry for measurable ROI.
Competition and market context for enterprise avatars
The business avatar space is a competitive one. Synthesia and Soul Machines are common contestants, and big-tech research is quickly lowering the barriers to lifelike digital presenters. Consulting firms have even started selling packaged avatar solutions to clients, an indication of increasing interest beyond the tech early adopters.
Demand tailwinds are strong.
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McKinsey research projects that generative AI has the potential to add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion in annual economic value globally, with sales, marketing and customer operations being the major beneficiaries. Gartner has predicted that by 2023, more than 80% of large organizations will not only use generative AI models and APIs but will also carry out audits in-house to mitigate risk to business outcomes, emphasizing the onus is on vendors to ship secure, governable and scalable offerings rather than standalone demos.
Others say it is a higher bar in regulated markets. Data residency, watermarking and rights management for synthetic talent are starting to become table stakes — particularly in Europe, as companies grapple with tightening AI governance standards and internal works council demands on training content, data residency, and labor impacts.
What to watch next as D-ID and Simpleshow integrate
Early indicators to watch will include how soon Simpleshow’s authoring suite coughs up D-ID avatars as default objects, the extent of interactive feature integration with popular LMS providers, and pricing that reflects enterprise scale (and localization at volume).
Longer run, the question is trust and effectiveness. If the combined stack can demonstrate improvements in completion rates, knowledge retention and translation accuracies — all while meeting privacy and compliance expectations — then they will have delivered a significant edge in enterprise-grade avatar video and not just some flashy demo.