According to submissions to the SEC, it is about a month after Moonvalley, who developed AI tools based in Los Angeles, which develops AI tools for video creation.
The filing filed Thursday reveals that Moonvalley has actually landed a total of about $53 million from a group of 14 unknown investors.
This filing shows that this is not an entirely new round, but an additional $10 million in cash. It is estimated that the company’s total was raised to around $124 million shortly after Moon Valley’s $70 million seed round last November. Moonvalley declined to comment.
The wide range of tools available to build video generators has led to an explosion of providers that are saturated with space. Startups like Runway, Lightricks, Genmo, Pika, Higgsfield, Kling, Luma, and tech giants like Openai, Alibaba and Google have released their models with high-speed clips. In many cases, it is rare to distinguish one model from another.
Built in collaboration with a new AI animation studio called Asteria, Moonvalley’s Marey model offers customization options such as fine-grained cameras and motion controls, allowing you to generate “HD” clips up to 30 seconds. Moonvalley argues that it is less risky than other video generation models from a legal perspective.
But if Moonvalley is trying to distinguish between itself – therefore the VC’s interest – is the data it is using to train the model, as well as the safeguard for the video creation tools.
Many generated video startups train models of public data, some of which are always copyrighted. These companies claim that fair doctrine protects practices, but that has not stopped rights holders from filing complaints and filing requests.
Moonvalley says they work with partners to handle license arrangements, package the video and package it into data sets that the company purchases. This approach is similar to that of Bria and Adobe, the latter sources training content from creators through its own Adobe stock platform.
Moonvalley creates an interface for that model. The company’s software, which has not yet been released, includes storyboards and “granular” clip adjustment tools, revealed in a recent interview by the co-founder of Moonvalley. Marey can generate videos not only from text prompts, but also from sketches, photos and other video clips, Moonvalley claims.
Naeem Talukdar, who previously led product growth at Zapier, founded Moonvalley along with former Deepmind scientists Mateusz Malinowski and Mik Binkowski. John Thomas joined as Moon Valley COO. He and Tarkudar founded another startup, Draft, a few years ago. Moonvalley also counts Asteria Head Bryn Mooser as a co-founder.
It’s only natural for video generators as many artists and creators are threatening to overturn the film and television industry. A 2024 study commissioned by the Animation Guild, a union representing Hollywood animators and cartoonists, estimates that by 2026 more than 100,000 US-based film, television and animation jobs will be destroyed by AI.
Moonvalley plans to require creators to remove content from the model, allowing customers to delete data at any time, and provide compensation policies to protect users from copyright issues.
Unlike some “unfiltered” video models that easily insert people’s portraits into clips, Moonvalley also promises to build guardrails around that tool. Like Openai’s Sora, Moonvalley’s model cannot block certain content, such as NSFW phrases, and encourage users to generate videos of specific people or celebrities.
“We founded Moonvalley to create generative video technology that will help filmmakers and creative experts,” Moonvalley wrote in a blog post in March. “It means dealing with fear and mistrust and solving technical problems that prevent generative AI from becoming a realistic tool for professional production.”