Gaurav Misra is an American technology entrepreneur, engineer and the co-founder and CEO of Mirage, the company formerly known as Captions.
Misra co-founded Captions with Dwight Churchill in 2021. The company initially focused on simplifying the creation of talking-head videos, particularly through automatic captioning and video-production tools. Over time, Captions expanded into AI-powered editing, translation, dubbing, voice generation, avatars, AI Twins and generative video.
Before founding Captions, Misra developed a career in software and design engineering. His professional background includes work at Lattice Engines, Microsoft, Localytics and Snap. At Snap, he led a design-engineering organization and worked on products including Snap Map.
Misra and Churchill had previously worked together at Localytics and had discussed eventually starting a company. According to Misra's own account, he built an early Captions prototype over a weekend and released it on the App Store. The product subsequently attracted significant organic attention, helping validate the initial concept.
The original Captions product was not a foundation-model company. It was a focused creator application designed to make talking-video production easier. Its technology and product scope subsequently expanded considerably.
Captions introduced increasingly sophisticated AI capabilities, including automated editing, AI-generated presenters, AI Twins, voice generation, translation, dubbing and lip synchronization. The company also developed an eye-contact correction feature, with reporting indicating collaboration with NVIDIA on the technology.
In 2024, Captions announced its Series C financing and described an expanding AI-video research effort. By this period, the company had moved substantially beyond automated captions toward AI-generated video and synthetic media.
In March 2025, Captions introduced Mirage, describing it as an in-house foundation model for UGC-style video generation. The company's subsequent research materials describe Mirage's technology as end-to-end multimodal foundation models that work across audio, video and text.
In September 2025, the company adopted Mirage as its corporate and research identity while Captions remained the consumer-facing product. Mirage's current research organization focuses on generative video, multimodal modeling, dataset development, audiovisual evaluation, large-scale training and inference.
Misra has also been named among the contributors to Mirage's avatar-video research. The June 2025 research report "Casting Voices: Foundation Model Research" identifies Misra alongside Aditi Sundararaman, Alex Du, Danny Oh, Elena Tomlinson and other contributors.
This research demonstrates that the later technology behind Captions/Mirage was developed by a broader engineering and research organization rather than by one individual inventor.
Accordingly, Misra is best described as a co-founder, technical/product leader and documented contributor to the development of Captions and Mirage, rather than as the sole inventor of all of the company's AI technology.
Captions did not invent artificial intelligence, speech recognition, voice cloning, AI avatars or generative video as technological fields. Instead, the company integrated these established areas of research into creator-focused products while subsequently developing proprietary audiovisual foundation models and avatar-generation systems under Mirage.
As CEO, Misra continues to lead Mirage's development of AI-powered video creation and its broader foundation-model strategy.
Key Contributions
- Co-founded Captions in 2021 with Dwight Churchill.
- Helped develop the original Captions product.
- Built the early Captions prototype according to his own public account.
- Provided technical and product leadership as Captions expanded.
- Led the company's transition from captioning and editing toward generative video.
- Helped shape Mirage's foundation-model strategy.
- Participated in documented Mirage avatar-video research.
- Leads Mirage as its co-founder and CEO.
Founder vs. Inventor
The public evidence supports identifying Gaurav Misra as a founder and technical/product leader of Captions/Mirage.
It does not establish him as the sole inventor of the entire Captions platform or every technology used by the company. Mirage's later AI systems were developed by a broader engineering and research team.
The public research record also does not establish Gaurav Bhatt or Dimitris Tsimouris as founders, inventors, engineers or researchers associated with Captions/Mirage.
Company Evolution
2021: Captions founded by Gaurav Misra and Dwight Churchill.
2021–2022: Early talking-video and captioning product gains traction.
2022–2024: Expansion into translation, dubbing, AI editing and generative creator tools.
2024: AI Creator, AI Edit and AI Twin capabilities expand the platform beyond traditional video editing.
March 2025: Mirage foundation-model technology introduced.
June 2025: Mirage publishes research describing its avatar-video foundation-model work.
September 2025: Company adopts Mirage as its corporate/research identity while retaining Captions as its flagship product.
2026: Mirage expands its foundation-model, avatar, video-generation and agentic creative capabilities.
Legacy
Gaurav Misra's significance in AI video lies in helping transform Captions from a focused talking-video application into a broader AI video platform and subsequently leading Mirage's development of proprietary multimodal video-generation technology.
His career illustrates the transition from conventional software and product engineering toward integrated AI-powered creative systems and foundation-model development.
