The Toronto-based company has raised $154 million since its establishment in 2023.
Toronto-based Moonvalley, an AI research company that develops basic AI video models, has raised a $84 million ($115 million CAD) seed extension round to scale up for demand.
The round was led by General Catalyst, along with participation from strategic investors such as the Hollywood Talent Agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), AI Cloud Computing Company CoreWeave and Comcast Ventures.
“The funding proves that there is no need to choose strong technology and responsible development.”
Naeem Talukdar
Moonvalley CEO
The round is the latest in a young company that has been raising US$154 million since its establishment in 2023. Moonvalley raised a $70 million seed round, co-led by Catalyst and Khosla Ventures, to fund research and development in 2024.
Moonvalley said the funding reflects a shift in the industry prioritizing AI that “respects intellectual property.” Last week, the company announced the general availability of Marey, a basic AI video model trained only with approved high-resolution footage.
“No scrapped content, no user submissions, no legal gray zones,” reads the website.
Developed by employees at Ex-Deepmind and Google Research, the model is designed for filmmakers with cinematography in mind, says Moonvalley. The company claims that AI tools can turn 2D images into a 3D environment that controls the movement of the generated video through drawing rather than text prompted, moving them from reference videos to video generated by drawing.
The company was founded by Toronto CEOs Naeem Talukdar and COO John Thomas and Bryn Mooser, Chief Scientific Officer of Mateusz Malinowski, Vice-President of Research at Mikołaj Biñkowski. Mooser, a two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker for Oscar-nominated documentary shorts, leads Moonvalley's film production unit Asteria Labs.
“The funding proves that there is no need to choose between strong technology and responsible development,” Talukdar said in a statement.
Moonvalley's focus on legally cleared training content is that major AI companies around the world, such as Openai, Meta and Toronto-based Cohere, deal with contracts with many lawsuits claiming large-scale copyright infringement through data scraping that are not permitted to train AI models. Rhei, a Vancouver-based media tech company previously known as BBTV, launched its own platform earlier this year to help digital content creators license content for training AI models.
Related: The outcome of copyright to Cohere is uncertain, but there is a possibility of “setting precedent”: Experts
Actors and creative workers have been fighting the AI that has creeped into their fields in recent years. During the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, unions representing Hollywood actors and others in the television, film and radio industries sought protection from technology. In a statement, Alexandra Shannon, Head of CAA Strategic Development, said, “AI's ethically led and talent-friendly applications are top priority.”
“Moonvalley understands that AI should empower artists rather than undermine artists, and is excited to bring this new technology to our clients and to our entertainment community as a whole,” says Shannon.
The fresh capital will support the size of Moonvalley to meet the company's demand for its model, the company said. This includes expanding the licensed content library, improving access to developers, building requested features from partners, and hiring the engineering and support teams needed to deploy enterprise-scale.
Moonvalley, functional images courtesy.
