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New Delhi: The scene is familiar. A growth marketer stares at the week’s dashboard, groans at the expensive “UGC” that looks identical to last week’s, and wonders why the needle won’t move.
Then someone shows them a two-minute ad recorded by a creator who never came to set. The brand picked a face, pasted a script, hit generate, and paid roughly the price of lunch. Welcome to Simora.AI’s world, where “user-generated” no longer means booking a shoot, and authenticity is defined less by the camera and more by consent and clarity.
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“Simora is not just AI… It’s a fusion of human plus AI,” said founder Dhanraj Dhanokar.
The platform clones consenting creators for brand use and also offers fully synthetic AI actors when real humans are impractical or off-limits.
The workflow is kept deliberately simple: pick a creator from a gallery, paste a script, and generate the video. “You can generate AI video content using AI creators,” Dhanokar said.
“Select a creator, put in a script, and your video content gets generated.”
For brands that want help upstream, Simora will sometimes script and edit, but it positions itself as a product company rather than an agency. Long term, Dhanokar imagines a safer, consent-first space where creators license clones and brands generate assets at will: value paid to people, scale handled by models.
Here are a few examples:
Why creators say yes
If AI can reproduce your face, do you not undercut your own rates? Dhanokar’s answer starts with a hard truth about creator incomes. Follower counts do not equal money. Plenty of accounts with 300,000 to a million followers still make Rs 25,000 to Rs 50,000 per campaign, if that. Deals are sporadic. Simora offers upfront licensing fees to a growing pool of a few hundred creators and actors, and is explicit that the people already earning handsomely will probably not sign.
“Some money is better than no money,” he said. The company is preparing a revenue-share programme, but until then, cash moves up front and the fine print is clear.
Pricing built for testing, not vanity
Here’s the hook for performance marketers: the economics are designed around variation. Dhanokar’s argument is blunt: testing 20–30 ad variants with full shoots burns time and cash before you even find a winner. Simora’s public plans list monthly tiers at Rs 9,440, Rs 17,700, and Rs 24,780, with a custom/enterprise option on top; brands buy a plan, spin out variations quickly, and scale the ones that work.
The internal math mirrors the pitch: many teams are producing 100–500 videos a month; a typical two-minute generation works out to roughly Rs 800 per clip within a plan. “We allow brands to test at a cheaper rate… get 10–30 videos within 20–30,000… then scale what works,” Dhanokar said. His cautionary example is the old way: “Even if one content needs 10,000… multiplied by 30… that’s three lakhs per day… You lose a lot of money.”
Guardrails and the grey zones
Licensing a face raises obvious questions. What if a script overreaches on claims or taste? Simora says every script is run through trained checks and scored; anything below a threshold is blocked. Misleading claims are out. Grey or taboo categories are restricted to 100% AI actors; human clones aren’t available there. Political criticism is treated as opinion, but “facts” are scrutinised. The aim is straightforward: label ads as ads, keep creators safe, and prevent deception by policy and by product.
Built in India for Indian nuance
Ask what differentiates Simora, and Dhanokar skips buzzwords for accents. The product leans on speech-to-speech so creators can sound convincingly local. For briefs that need Hyderabadi Urdu, a Gujarati lilt, or a specific Hindi cadence, the system localises delivery in a way many Western-trained models don’t. If AI can’t sound local, it stays a toy; the team has sweated those details.
The bigger argument about “authenticity”
Influencer marketing rose on the promise of real people talking plainly. AI seems to rattle that idea, and Dhanokar doesn’t deny the discomfort. His frame is simple. If a piece is clearly labelled as an ad and doesn’t fabricate outcomes, the question isn’t “was a camera present?” but “did this help a buyer decide?” Reviews should be human and independent. Ads are persuasion. In that world, AI is a production method, not a moral category; it's the same marketing, simply faster.
Why the timing matters
Modern performance marketing is ruthless. You test dozens of variants to find one winner, and you pay for the privilege of being wrong. Simora’s pitch isn’t romantic; it’s operational: cut the cost of variation, raise the volume of tests, keep creators paid for what they license, and ship results sooner.