Roughly a month afterMoonvalley, a Los Angeles-based startup developing AI tools for video creation, said it secured $43 million in new funding, the company has raised more, according to a filing with the SEC.The filing, submitted Thursday, reveals that Moonvalley actually landed (so far) around $53 million total from a group of 14 unnamed investors.
The filing indicates that this is an additional $10 million in cash, rather than a whole new round.
It brings the companys total raised to about $124 million, estimates PitchBook, following on the heels of Moonvalleys $70 million seed round last November.
Moonvalley declined to comment.The wide availability of tools to build video generators has led to such an explosion of providers that the space is becoming saturated.
Startups such asRunway, Lightricks, Genmo, Pika, Higgsfield, Kling,and Luma, as well as tech giants likeOpenAI, Alibaba, andGoogle, are releasing models at a fast clip.
In many cases, little distinguishes one model from another.Moonvalleys Marey model, built in collaboration with anew AI animation studiocalled Asteria, offers customization options like fine-grained camera and motion controls and can generate HD clips up to 30 seconds long.
Moonvalley claims its also lower risk than some other video-generation models from a legal perspective.But where Moonvalley is attempting to differentiate itself hence the high VC interest is on the data its using to train its models, as well as the safeguards in its video creation tools.Many generative-video startups train models on public data, some of which is invariably copyrighted.
These companies argue thatfair-usedoctrine shields the practice, but that hasnt stopped rights holdersfrom lodging complaintsand filing cease and desists.Moonvalley says its working with partners to handle licensing arrangements and package videos into datasets that the company then purchases.
The approach is similar to Brias andAdobes, the latter of which procures content for training from creators through its proprietary Adobe Stock platform.Moonvalley is also crafting an interface for its model.
The companys software, which it hasnt previewed publicly yet, has storyboarding and granular clip adjustment tools, Moonvalleys co-founders revealed in recent interviews.
Marey can generate videos from not only text prompts but also from sketches, photos, and other video clips, claims Moonvalley.Naeem Talukdar, who previously led product growth at Zapier, founded Moonvalley with former DeepMind scientists Mateusz Malinowski and Mik Binkowski.
John Thomas joined as Moonvalleys COO he and Talukdar had founded another startup, Draft, several years ago.
Moonvalley also counts Asteria head Bryn Mooser as a co-founder.
Many artists and creators are understandably wary of video generators, as they threaten to upend the film and television industry.
A 2024studycommissioned by the Animation Guild, a union representing Hollywood animators and cartoonists, estimates that more than 100,000 U.S.-based film, television, and animation jobs will be disrupted by AI by 2026.Moonvalley intends to allow creators to request their content be removed from its models, let customers delete their data at any time, and offer anindemnity policyto protect its users from copyright challenges.Unlike some unfiltered video models that readily insert a persons likeness into clips, Moonvalley is also committing to building guardrails around its tools.
Like OpenAIs Sora, Moonvalleys models will block certain content, like NSFW phrases, and wont allow users to prompt them to generate videos of specific people or celebrities.We founded Moonvalley to make generative video technology that works for filmmakers and creative professionals, Moonvalley wrote in a blog post in March.
That means addressing fear and distrust, as well as solving technical problems that keep generative AI from being a realistic tool for professional production.