Kaltura acquires eSelf, founded by creator of Snap’s AI, in $27M deal (techcrunch.com)

Kaltura has agreed to acquire Israeli conversational-avatar startup eSelf.ai for about $27 million. eSelf, co‑founded in 2023 by Alan Bekker (who sold Voca to Snap) and CTO Eylon Shoshan, builds photorealistic, multilingual (30+ languages) digital humans with a low‑latency speech stack, speech‑to‑video generation, and screen‑understanding capabilities that let avatars “see” and respond to a user’s screen. The small team (~15 engineers) and founders will join Kaltura to embed eSelf’s studio and runtime into Kaltura’s cloud video suite, enabling agents that listen, speak, lip‑sync in real time, and interact with on‑screen context. For the AI/ML community this signals growing enterprise demand for real‑time, multimodal conversational agents that go beyond pre‑rendered lip‑sync to synchronous dialogue with visual context. Key technical takeaways: production-grade low‑latency ASR/TTS + speech‑to‑video pipelines, computer vision for screen understanding, multilingual support and an end‑to‑end avatar creation/deployment workflow. Kaltura plans to deploy these agents across education, customer support, sales, training and media, turning video into an interactive interface connected to enterprise knowledge—pushing research and engineering priorities toward scalable, privacy‑aware inference, latency optimization, and tight integration of NLP, TTS, and gesture/face synthesis for real‑time applications.