Roughly a month after Moonvalley, 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 company’s total raised to about $124 million, estimates Pitchbook, following on the heels of Moonvalley’s $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 as Runway, Lightricks, Genmo, Pika, Higgsfield, Kling, and Luma, as well as tech giants like OpenAI, Alibaba, and Google, are releasing models at a fast clip. In many cases, little distinguishes one model from another.
Moonvalley’s Marey model, built in collaboration with a new AI animation studio called Asteria, offers customization options like fine-grained camera and motion controls, and can generate “HD” clips up to 30 seconds long. Moonvalley claims it’s 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 it’s 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 that fair-use doctrine shields the practice, but that hasn’t stopped rights holders from lodging complaints and filing cease and desists.
Moonvalley says it’s working with partners to handle licensing arrangements and package videos into datasets that the company then purchases. The approach is similar to Bria’s and Adobe’s, 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 company’s software, which it hasn’t previewed publicly yet, has storyboarding and “granular” clip adjustment tools, Moonvalley’s co-founders revealed in recent interviews. Marey can generate videos not only from text prompts but 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 Moonvalley’s 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 2024 study commissioned 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 an indemnity policy to protect its users from copyright challenges.
Unlike some “unfiltered” video models that readily insert a person’s likeness into clips, Moonvalley is also committing to building guardrails around its tools. Like OpenAI’s Sora, Moonvalley’s models will block certain content, like NSFW phrases, and won’t 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.”