Mirage raises $75M from General Catalyst to build AI video models

Mirage, the company behind the AI video editing app Captions, has raised $75 million in a growth round. The investor is General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, a specialized fund that backs businesses with proven consumer demand that are ready to scale.

Captions emerged as a response to one of the main barriers in video production: post-production takes creators more time than shooting does. The app uses language and vision models to automatically add subtitles, correct gaze direction in the frame, improve audio and suggest editing options right on a smartphone or laptop screen. While the person reads from a script, the model recalculates eye direction in real time so the speaker appears to look straight into the camera. This addresses a real pain point for creators of educational and business content.

Renaming the company Mirage is not just a rebrand. It reflects a change of strategy: the company now positions itself as an AI model developer, not merely a consumer app. This is an important shift in emphasis. The AI video market is quickly filling up with tools built on other companies' models, and the long-term competitive advantage lies in proprietary models tuned for specific use cases.

General Catalyst is known for betting on companies at a transitional moment of growth. Customer Value Fund is a mechanism for supporting businesses that have already demonstrated product-market fit. $75 million is a significant sum for a consumer AI startup, especially as the mobile video editing market is going through consolidation. Captions makes money through subscriptions, and a stable base of paying users gives investors a clear return metric.

AI video is now one of the most competitive areas of consumer technology. ByteDance's CapCut dominates mainstream mobile editing. Adobe is expanding generative features in Premiere and After Effects. Descript and Runway are fighting for the professional segment. Against this backdrop, Captions has picked a niche: short vertical videos for content creators, where AI assistance is critical and tolerance for poor editing is minimal.

The new round should speed up development of Mirage's next generation of models. By the product's logic, the next step is generating video from text or images directly inside Captions, without switching to third-party services.

For the AI investment market, this round confirms a trend: money is flowing not only into large foundation models but also into applied products with a stable audience. Specialized AI tools for specific content formats prove to be more resilient businesses than general-purpose editors. General Catalyst is confirming its interest in consumer AI at a time when many investors have switched exclusively to the infrastructure B2B layer.