HeyGen works with the help of neural networks. It extracts audio and images by analyzing the original video. The system transcribes speech, translates it into another language, and then adjusts lip movements and facial expressions by dubbing similar-sounding voices from scratch. To summarize all of this, we can say that HeyGen is essentially an application for creating deepfakes. Now on the network you can find English memes “I love the way you burn”, “The feeling that God is punishing us for something”, the famous in German “Stand up” and others.

It all starts in China

According to official information, stated on the page HeyGen is on Social Network X, a startup from California. The page is maintained in English only. But according to LIGA.net, the service actually has Chinese roots.

The founders of the company are Joshua Xu (Joshua Xu) and Wayne Liang (Wayne Liang). The first worked for Snapchat for many years, and the second is in TikTok’s American office.

• At the beginning of their history in 2020, they both launched a product called: surreal, was actually the same deepfake generator underlying the current version. It proved extremely popular among Chinese users and very quickly attracted investments of $2 to $3 million from Chinese funds Sequoia Capital China and ZhenFund. TechCrunch wrote about it at the time, directly calling it Chinese, because it was apparently created in China, in the city of Shenzhen.
• After a while, changing the company name Film and moving to Los Angeles. It manages to attract another $9 million from the same Sequoia and another Chinese firm, Baidu Ventures. The third new investor was American International Data Group (IDG). Currently, the company offers customized avatars for commercial customers without making its product available to the masses. Chinese companies see great benefit from the service because they can shoot cheap advertising for themselves and then easily modify it for the Western market, adding English and casting new non-Asian faces (because they believe Chinese models don’t do that). Attracting consumers outside the Chinese market).
• The year 2023 is coming. Movio is changing its name again and is now called: HeyGen. Its LinkedIn page reports that no more than 50 people work for the service, some of whom are studying at Chinese public universities.

We cannot do without Russia

Another important point that attracts attention is the current management of the company. As the source writes, citing data from the same LinkedIn, One of the management positions in the company belongs to Russian Veronika Kacha.. He heads the company’s business development department, and before that he studied at the Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad. His native language is Russian and his previous place of employment was the medical and analytical company Zabota 2.0 in Moscow. Judging by his social networks, Kacha changed his place of permanent residence to Los Angeles, but continues to periodically visit Russia.

Results

Of course, all this does not necessarily mean that HeyGen is working for the Chinese and Russian governments, for example collecting some information about users, because there is no direct evidence of this. The company has not been involved in scandals, floods of information or high-profile revelations that might indicate this. But these two facts give many reasons to think and doubt.