According to filings with the SEC, Moonvalley, an AI tool that develops AI, said it had received $43 million in new funding, the company raised more money a month after it received $43 million in new funding.
The filing filed Thursday showed that Moonvalley actually received about $53 million from a group of 14 unnamed investors.
The document shows that it's another $10 million in cash, not a brand new round. It is estimated that the company raised about $124 million in total after Moonvalley's $70 million seed round last November. Moonvalley declined to comment.
The wide availability of tools to build video generators has led to an explosion of providers that the space becomes saturated. Runways, startups like Lightricks, Genmo, Pika, Higgsfield, Kling and Luma, as well as tech giants like OpenAI, Alibaba and Google, are releasing models in a quick clip. In many cases, few are differentiated from one model.
Moonvalley's Marey model was built in partnership with the new AI Animation Studio, called Asteria, and offers customization options such as fine-grained cameras and motion controls, and can generate "HD" clips for up to 30 seconds. From a legal standpoint, it also has lower risks than some other video generation models.
However, where Moonvalley tries to differentiate itself (and therefore, high VC interest) is on the data of safeguards used in training models as well as video creation tools.
Many generative video startups train models on public data, some of which are always copyrighted. These companies believe that the doctrine of fair use obscures this practice, but that does not prevent rights holders from complaining and making a stop and termination.
Moonvalley said it is working with partners to process licensing arrangements and packaging videos into the dataset the company then purchases. The approach is similar to Bria's and Adobe's, which provides content for creators' training through its proprietary Adobe stock platform.
Moonvalley is also making interfaces for its models. Moonvalley's co-founder revealed in a recent interview that the company's software has not been publicly previewed, with storyboards and "granule" editing tuning tools. Moonvalley claims that Marey can generate videos not only from text prompts, but also from sketches, photos, and other video clips.
Naeem Talukdar, who once led product growth at Zapier, established Moonvalley with former Deepmind scientists Mateusz Malinowski and Mik Binkowski. John Thomas joins Moonvalley's COO - he and Talukdar founded another startup, Draft, a few years ago. Moonvalley also sees Asteria Head Bryn Mooser as co-founder.
Understandably, many artists and creators have a cautious attitude towards video generators because they threaten to disrupt the film and television industry. A 2024 study commissioned by the Animation Guild, an union representing Hollywood animators and cartoonists, estimates that AI will be interrupted by AI by 2026.
Moonvalley intends to allow creators to delete their content from their models, let customers delete their data at any time, and provide compensation policies to protect their users from copyright challenges.
Unlike some "unfiltered" videotapes that easily insert one's similarity into a clip, Moonvalley is also working on building guardrails around its tools. Like Openai's Sora, Moonvalley's model will block certain content, such as NSFW phrases, and will not allow users to prompt them to generate videos of specific people or celebrities.
"We founded Moonvalley to create generative video technology that works effectively for film producers and creative professionals," Moonvalley wrote in a March blog post. "This means addressing fear and distrust, and addressing the technical issues that make generative AI a professional production tool."