Zoe Chan spent more than a decade aiming for a breakthrough moment in filmmaking.
“There’s a hierarchy, there’s a gatekeeper,” Zhang told Business Insider. Without funding or industry connections, it felt “nearly impossible” to make it into a film.
And she harnessed the cacophony of AI tools to create the first film using artificial intelligence: an animated short. The project won the “Best Visual” award at MIT’s 2025 AI Film Hack. It was a “turning point” in her filmmaking career, Chan said.
She soon teamed up with her husband, Ray Wang, a former Instagram engineer, to build tools that could use AI to make more movies. The project evolved into Flick, a generative AI video startup that was accepted into Y Combinator’s fall 2025 batch.
Flick recently raised $6 million in seed funding, Business Insider exclusively reported. The round is backed by companies and angel investors including True Ventures, GV, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator.
The pitch to investors relied heavily on the founder’s story of a (literal) marriage of technology and film.
“They came together to create a combination of engineering and art,” Mike Montano, a partner at True Ventures, told Business Insider. Wang’s experience building consumer products at Instagram, combined with Zhang’s creativity and understanding of the filmmaking process, brought Montano to the team. Seeing the startup’s product demo was an important part of Frick’s pitch, he added.
Flick allows anyone to create short films on its platform using chat-based prompts and several AI models, including Google’s Nano Banana and Veo 3, and ByteDance’s Seedance and Midjourney. Its platform costs between $5 and $600 per month, depending on the amount of credits users need. The interface is designed to emulate a storyboard, allowing creators to move film frames around the canvas, add notes, and create and edit new scenes without opening a new tab. Flick emphasizes that maintaining character consistency from frame to frame is one of its core services.
Wang said Flick is designed to “speak the language of the filmmakers” so they can focus on the story itself rather than tinkering with AI tools.
Hollywood is seeing a proliferation of platforms that promote themselves as AI solutions that solve filmmakers’ problems. Some startups like Flick have raised millions of dollars by building user-friendly platforms on top of AI models. For example, Moments Lab, which uses raw footage and AI to create new content faster, raised $24 million in Series B funding last year.
The higher goal for Flick and other competitors in the space is to use these tools to democratize access to filmmaking. In theory, this could save you many steps, such as purchasing camera equipment, hiring actors, and renting sets.
“We understand that people are concerned about Hollywood jobs being replaced by AI,” Wang said. “We believe we are creating more jobs,” Wang added, because more people will be able to make movies.
The five-person company is building more relationships with Hollywood as it expands. The company is also considering moving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles.
“We want to show the world that we want to help people create the highest quality, most beautiful content,” Wang said.
Read the pitch deck Flick used to raise a $6 million seed round.
Note: Some slides and figures have been edited.