Kaltura announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire eSelf.ai, a multimodal AI company specializing in conversational, photorealistic avatars designed for real-time interaction. The acquisition supports Kaltura’s strategic expansion from providing enterprise video experiences to enabling immersive virtual agents and AI-driven interactive environments across customer and employee applications.
Founded in 2023, eSelf.ai develops technology that combines expressive visual avatars with low-latency speech recognition and generation, screen interpretation, media sharing, and an enterprise-grade agentic framework. The company’s team of more than 15 specialists is led by co-founders Dr. Alan Bekker and Eylon Shoshan. Dr. Bekker previously co-founded Voca.ai, which was later acquired by Snap, where he subsequently led conversational AI programs.
Kaltura plans to integrate eSelf.ai’s avatar technology throughout the Kaltura AI Video Experience Cloud. This integration is designed to enable Kaltura’s existing Genies offerings across learning, collaboration, customer experience, and media environments to function as conversational visual agents, capable of hearing, speaking, and analyzing user interactions in real-time. The company also plans to introduce embeddable self-service avatars and to use eSelf.ai’s platform as the foundation for a new video-on-demand content creation tool that can automatically add speaking avatars directly into recorded content.
The company expects the technology to create new upsell opportunities and accelerate adoption across enterprises of various sizes. In marketing applications, organizations will be able to utilize immersive agents embedded within digital properties to offer personalized product guidance and brand interactions. Within sales environments, virtual sales development representatives will be able to qualify prospects, deliver tailored pitches, and act as simulated customers for training. For customer support and training, immersive agents will be able to analyze user screens, guide troubleshooting procedures, demonstrate workflows using dynamic video snippets, and support certification and onboarding processes.
In employee experience settings, avatars will be able to conduct initial candidate interviews within recruiting workflows and support internal onboarding, reskilling, and compliance training with personalized guidance. They will also be used for internal communications and employee help desk scenarios to provide tailored information regarding company initiatives, benefits, employment terms, and IT support. Additional use cases include personalized teaching assistants in education, content and engagement hosts for media and telecom experiences, guided shopping agents in retail and ecommerce, advisory agents for financial services, care navigation aides for healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations, and enterprise support agents within professional services environments capable of screen awareness and controlled task execution.
Financial terms include a cash payment of $7.5 million upon closing, followed by up to $12.5 million over three years contingent upon performance milestones, and 4,690,025 shares of Kaltura common stock vesting over three years for founders and key employees. If all milestones and retention conditions are fulfilled, the total deal value is estimated at approximately $27 million. The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 2025, pending customary regulatory and closing requirements.
KEY QUOTES:
“We are excited at the opportunity to welcome the talented eSelf.ai team and their cutting-edge technology. This acquisition will expand our content creation tools to include AI-based avatar content, and most importantly will accelerate our expansion into powering also immersive, real-time, virtual agents for customer and employee experiences. Kaltura is ideally positioned for this next phase of evolution. We provide market-leading AI-infused video experiences to enterprises at great scale, with unmatched reliability and security. Our cross-enterprise platform already addresses a wide array of customer and employee experiences, and we manage an immense volume of video content and from it, generate invaluable actionable insights. We have deep workflow integrations thanks to our API-first architecture; and we power a large, diversified blue-chip enterprise customer base that is thirsty for more immersive solutions. We are excited about the great opportunity this acquisition presents to supercharge our current AI-infused products and to launch new products for organizations of all industries and sizes, including new self-serve offerings that will boost our PLG motion.”
Ron Yekutiel, Co-founder, Chairman, President and CEO, Kaltura
“eSelf.ai enables immersive, real-time conversations with agentic avatars that are highly engaging, hyper-personalized, and impactful. Once the transaction closes, joining Kaltura will take our conversational avatars to production at a global scale, embed them directly into events, learning, TV, and customer experience workflows, and make them immediately accessible to a wide customer base through our self-serve studio. We are very excited at the opportunity to add our human-like, real-time agentic interaction capabilities to Kaltura’s market-leading AI-infused video platform, and its great distribution and fulfillment capabilities, to deliver together increased business outcomes to customers worldwide.”
Dr. Alan Bekker, Co-founder and CEO, eSelf.ai
