Kaltura has signed a definitive agreement to acquire eSelf.ai, a multimodal AI startup focused on agentic, photorealistic avatars. The deal, inked on November 5, 2025, signals Kaltura’s push beyond enterprise video into immersive, AI-driven virtual agents for customers and employees. The company expects the combination to reshape how organizations create, deploy, and scale conversational video experiences.
Strategic Rationale
Kaltura positions the acquisition as a catalyst for its AI Video Experience Cloud, expanding from video delivery to real-time, avatar-led interactions. Management argues that enterprises want agents that can watch, listen, speak, and act across workflows without sacrificing security or reliability. By embedding eSelf.ai across its stack, Kaltura aims to elevate engagement metrics and create new monetization paths.
Technology and Team
Founded in 2023, eSelf.ai builds conversational avatars that are photorealistic, multilingual, and responsive in low latency. The platform blends live visual agents with speech recognition and generation, screen understanding, dynamic media sharing, and an enterprise-grade agentic framework. The team of more than 15 AI specialists is led by co-founders Dr. Alan Bekker and Eylon Shoshan, with Bekker previously co-founding Voca.ai and leading conversational AI at Snap.
Product Integration Plan
Kaltura intends to infuse eSelf.ai’s technology into its market-leading video products and its Genies for Class, Work, CX, and TV. Executives say these Genies will become conversational and visually expressive, able to hear users, speak back, and analyze on-screen context in real time. Planned integrations with enterprise systems and content repositories are designed to let agents augment roles at scale while preserving governance.
Stand-Alone Avatars and Content Tools
Beyond platform embedding, Kaltura plans to offer embeddable, self-serve interactive avatars to accelerate its product-led growth motion. The company also expects to launch a video-on-demand creation tool that inserts speaking photorealistic or animated avatars into any video automatically. Together, these offerings are pitched as a bridge between campaign content and persistent agentic experiences.
Use Cases Across Functions and Industries
Kaltura highlights marketing agents that personalize web journeys, sales agents that qualify leads in digital rooms, and support agents that troubleshoot with screen comprehension. Inside the enterprise, it points to recruiting, onboarding, reskilling, and internal help-desk scenarios that benefit from hyper-personalized engagement. Sector-focused applications include teaching assistants in education, entertainment hosts in media, guided selling in retail, advisory in financial services, and care navigation in healthcare.
Market Impact and Customer Reach
The company expects the acquisition to unlock upsell opportunities across its premium customer base while attracting new large accounts. It also sees a long tail of self-serve adoption by small and midsize businesses and departmental teams inside bigger organizations. If successful, Kaltura’s funnel would span top-down enterprise deals and bottom-up PLG entry points.
Transaction Details and Timing
Financial terms include a cash payment of 7.5 million dollars at closing and up to 12.5 million dollars in cash payable over three years, contingent on performance milestones. In addition, 4,690,025 Kaltura common shares will vest over three years subject to retention provisions for founders and key employees, representing about 3 percent of outstanding stock before the deal. Assuming all earnout and retention targets are met, the company pegs total consideration at roughly 27 million dollars, with closing targeted for the fourth quarter of 2025 subject to customary approvals.
Leadership Commentary
Kaltura Co-founder, Chairman, President and CEO Ron Yekutiel said the acquisition should supercharge the company’s AI-infused products and speed new offerings for organizations of all sizes. He emphasized Kaltura’s at-scale distribution, security, API-first integrations, and large enterprise customer base as differentiators for bringing avatars into production. eSelf.ai Co-founder and CEO Dr. Alan Bekker said joining Kaltura will put the technology directly into events, learning, TV, and customer experience workflows, and will broaden access through a self-serve studio.
Company Backgrounds
Kaltura provides an AI Video Experience Cloud that spans enterprise and TV content management, virtual events and webinars, virtual classrooms, video portals, and extensions for LMS and CMS platforms. The company serves millions of end users across marketing, sales, customer success, training, communications, and entertainment. eSelf.ai, recognized by Fast Company in 2025 as one of the Next Big Things in Tech, brings a compact team with depth in computer vision, NLP, and speech.
If the deal closes as planned, Kaltura will move from enabling video experiences to powering end-to-end, avatar-led conversations that can perceive screens and act in workflows. The company is betting that enterprise demand for measurable, human-like AI agents will convert into cross-sell and PLG momentum. With eSelf.ai’s technology and team, Kaltura is positioning to compete at the intersection of video, generative AI, and operational automation.