Pitch Deck: Moments LabAI Startup raises $24 million for fast and cheap video

Moments Lab is part of the growing number of AI startups raising money to restructure Hollywood and related sectors.

Moments Lab provides the tools to index your video library and create new videos from raw footage.

The company recently raised $24 million in Series B funding from OXX, with participation from Orange Ventures, Kadmos, Supernova Invest and Elaia Partners. The funds will be used to deploy agent AI tools based on existing technologies. To date, it has raised $37.4 million.

Paris-based Moments Lab was founded in 2016 by twin brothers Fred and Philippe Petitpont. Philip was the product manager for the French media company TF1 Group. They say they believe media and entertainment companies need to produce more videos at a lower cost to supply the growing streaming ecosystem. Their clients include Warner Bros Discovery, BunniJ Entertainment, Fullwell Entertainment, Hearst, Thomson Reuters, Sinclair and Amazon Ads.

Moments Lab's core tool, MXT-2, infiltrates the components with video footage, such as those on the screen and what they are doing, and generates explanations for them.

The key pitch is to save users time and money. Philippe Petitpont said the technology can identify sound bits in clips such as social media and trailers, and highlight employee reels by citing internal investigations to highlight approximately seven times faster than employees. He also said that some clients are using their products to generate double revenue from social media.

“For them, that's how they create a new revenue stream,” Petitpont told Business Insider, referring to revenue from social media. “Up until now, it was very complicated for a production company to create a revenue stream because there was a huge need for humans. That's a very boring job.”

Moments Lab's new Agent AI tool is one of those tests by Hearst, collecting raw video material and turning it into rough cuts using written prompts.

Petitpont said AI agents can do this for just a small portion of the time it takes for people to do their job. He said the most promising application ever was reality television. Script TV is still a work in progress.

Petitpont said Moments Lab has gained momentum with Hollywood companies since the beginning of the year as it puts pressure on more shows and more shows at cost.

“The demand from Netflix, Amazon's Prime Video, Peacock, is so strong that production companies need to produce more content than ever before and there's no more money to create a show,” he said. “It's more important than ever that we can produce at a low cost, so they're interested in using new approaches.”

AI tools are widely used in Hollywood, making the production process more efficient and generate short videos from text for now.

However, Hollywood is very protective of its intellectual property, which is a barrier to adoption. The other is a labor union, and they are worried that AI will replace its members.

Petitpont said one of the longest-consuming parts of the sales process is ensuring that the legal team of a company does not use IP to train the model.

Moments Lab says the model is trained on a dataset of 1.5 billion assets, which describes it as a combination of open source content and content from partners (labs, media rights holders, and technology companies) that are part of the research program.

Companies do not avoid the idea that by automating the work done by assistant editors and others, they can reduce the need for human workers. Petitpont said one US financial media client hopes to use fewer editors as a result of using technology.

“The big question is will assistants start to become senior editors or will work disappear?” he said. “I don't know yet.”

One of the things that seems to be broadly agreed in the industry is that AI usage will grow. It's about saving time in pre-production and post-production features as well as speeding up high quality original videos.

Other startups working on film editing capabilities include Runway, Filmustage and Imaginario.

Petitpont imagines media companies using decades of news footage to build films about American history, as they only have months of ability to use AI to create full-length documentaries based on video libraries.

A year later, Moments Lab expects to provide predictive modeling tools that suggest video changes that can boost audiences.

“That's what we believe will be next and we're not far from it because viewer data is so easily available on YouTube,” he said. “Technology isn't a problem, it's more rights.”

Check out the key slides from the Pitch Deck Moment Lab used to raise Series B. Please remove some sensitive information.