Kaltura Pays About $27m for an Israeli AI Avatar Startup

Kaltura, the Israel-based video technology company, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire eSelf.ai, an Israeli-founded startup that builds AI-powered photorealistic avatars. Kaltura said the acquisition would fold eSelf.ai's multimodal avatar technology into its own platform, allowing real-time virtual agents for customer, employee and educational use.

The deal is valued at approximately $27 million, made up of cash, stock and performance-based payments, and was expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025. eSelf.ai was founded in 2023 by Dr Alan Bekker and Eylon Shoshan; its avatars support more than 30 languages, and the company was named by FastCompany as one of the "Next Big Things in Tech" in 2025. Kaltura said it planned to use the technology across its Genies products and in video-on-demand tools, widening self-serve AI offerings for enterprises and small businesses.

What Kaltura is actually buying

An avatar company is, in practice, a stack of hard real-time problems: speech recognition, text-to-speech, video synthesis and enough latency discipline that a conversation does not feel like a delayed phone call.

TechCrunch reported that eSelf's roughly 15-strong team specialises in speech-to-video generation and computer vision, that its avatars can hold synchronous conversation and interpret what is on a user's screen, and that the company had raised $4.5 million in a round announced in December 2024. All eSelf employees moved to Kaltura, with the co-founders taking integration roles. The report notes that one co-founder previously sold the startup Voca to Snap in 2020.

A small deal that moved the share price

Kaltura is listed on Nasdaq and sells cloud video products (corporate portals, webinars, virtual classrooms and TV streaming) to more than 800 enterprise customers including Amazon, Oracle and Salesforce, with revenue of about $180 million and roughly 600 employees, according to TechCrunch.

Calcalist reported that Kaltura's shares jumped more than 30% on the announcement, despite being down about 20% for the year to that point, and set the reaction against the company's longer decline: a valuation of roughly $300 million at the time, against $1.2 billion at its 2021 initial public offering. The same report gave third-quarter revenue of $43.9 million and a $2 million net profit excluding one-off items.

Where the deal sits in Israel's exit year

A $27 million acquisition is at the small end of a year dominated by very large ones. Globes, reporting Startup Nation Central's annual figures in December 2025, recorded $74.3 billion of mergers and acquisitions across 150 Israeli technology deals during the year, alongside $10.3 billion raised in initial public offerings and $15.6 billion in private funding.

What is still unclear

Kaltura did not break the $27 million into its cash, stock and performance-linked components, or say what targets the earn-out payments depend on. It did not give a timetable for when avatar features would appear in its products, and did not say whether eSelf.ai's existing customers would transfer.