D-ID

Overview D ID is an AI video generation platform built by D ID Ltd., a Tel Aviv company founded in 2017 by Gil Perry, Sella Blondheim, and Eliran Kuta. The company's original technical focus was face anonymization — protecting still images against face recognition — and pivoted the same underlying face animation research into a consumer product around 2020 with the Live Portrait and Creative Reality Studio products. By 2026, D ID sits in an interesting middle position between the enterprise talking avatar tools (Synthesia, HeyGen) and the creative video generation tools (Sora, Runway) — it is the tool that made "make a photo talk" a one click workflow and turned it into a viable business. Positioning wise, D ID is the photo to talking avatar specialist. Where Synthesia sells you a library of stock avatars and lets you script them, D ID starts from any still image you upload — a photo of a real person, a historical painting, a stylized character, a corporate headshot — and animates it into a talking presenter. This is a genuinely different creative primitive. Synthesia gives you a curated cast; D ID gives you the ability to cast anyone. The tradeoff is that D ID's animation quality on stock photos is behind Synthesia's Expressive Avatars on nuance and body language — you get a talking head, not a fully expressive presenter. The business has grown steadily on that positioning. D ID's customer mix includes marketing agencies producing personalized outreach video at scale, EdTech…