HeyGen turns rivals into customers

HeyGen’s biggest strategic advantage is that it can sell the shovel and run its own gold mine at the same time. Its studio product goes after the same marketer and training budgets as Veed, but its API also lets larger platforms plug avatar generation, dubbing, and personalization into their own products, which turns some potential rivals into customers and gives HeyGen a second path to distribution.

• Veed is building an all in one browser video stack for creation, editing, hosting, and sharing, with about $45M ARR as of October 2024. That makes HeyGen a direct competitor whenever AI avatars become one feature inside a broader editing suite rather than a standalone tool.
  1 sacra 3 sacra
• The API path matters because avatar generation is becoming infrastructure. In practice, that means a company like Canva, Wistia, or another incumbent can add talking heads, translation, or personalized video without building the models from scratch, while pressuring suppliers on price and quality over time.
  2 sacra 4 sacra
• HeyGen has already scaled faster than Veed on revenue, reaching $95M ARR by September 2025 versus Veed at $45M ARR in October 2024, by combining self serve creation with embedded distribution. That mix gives it more ways to capture demand as AI video spreads across many software categories.
  1 sacra 3 sacra 4 sacra

The market is heading toward fewer standalone AI video tools and more bundled workflows. As hosting, analytics, translation, and avatar generation get folded together, the winners will be the companies that either own the full workflow for business video or become the default model layer inside everyone else’s product.