Flam raises USD $40 million in QED-led funding round

Flam has raised USD $40 million in a Series B funding round led by QED Investors.

The round also included Claypond Capital, Martin Chavez, Olivier Pomel, Venky Harinarayan and Shah Rukh Khan.

Existing investors RTP Global and Dovetail increased their commitments as the San Francisco-based company expands its work in AI-driven interactive content. It has signed more than 100 enterprise customers over the past six quarters.

Those customers include Google, Grab and KFC, which use Flam's products across marketing, product visualisation, learning and development, entertainment, fan engagement, customer support and sales.

The new funding will support research and development for Flam's AI models, expansion of its product range and international growth in enterprise sales. Founded in 2021, the company also has teams in India and Japan.

Product range

Flam offers three main formats. Flicks are interactive videos that can switch a person, product or scene during playback. Forge is an editing model that changes a specified element in an image reference.

Airboards are 3D content delivered through a camera interface with touch, voice interactions and haptic feedback. Users do not need to install an app to access them.

The company also has a set of Visual Agents, human-like characters designed to hold conversations and carry out actions. These systems draw on tools including Fantom for facial expression, Finesse for voice and Falcon, a 26 billion-parameter mixture-of-experts large language model, for responses.

Flam says it holds more than 15 patents. Its image-to-video model, Fable, generates assets as native alpha channel videos.

Investor backing

QED Investors described the deal on a newer part of the content market, rather than on tools that refine existing formats.

"Almost every frontier AI content company we see is optimizing what already exists. Flam pointed at something else: how much of the content ecosystem is still untouched. That gap is bigger than most people think, and Flam is the first team we've seen with the infrastructure to go after it," said Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner at QED Investors.

A second QED executive cited customer growth and technical development as the basis for the firm's support.

"The traction was too exceptional to ignore," said Sandeep Patil, partner at QED Investors. "Every major shift in internet content has created new platforms and new winners. What tells us Flam will be one is not just the growth rate but also the pace of their AI research and the partners choosing to build on it."

Regional push

Outside the funding round, Flam has entered a partnership with Elang Mahkota Teknologi Emtek in Indonesia. The agreement is intended to bring its technology to brands across Southeast Asia.

Early backing also came from Ashutosh Srivastava, founder and chief executive officer of Veros Ventures. Srivastava previously worked at WPP and left the group as chief executive officer of GroupM Asia Pacific, a media buying and planning operation serving major consumer brands.

Founder Shourya Agarwal said the company's core thesis is that digital content is shifting towards more responsive formats.

"Flam is built on a simple observation. Content has moved in waves, from text to images to video, and every wave flowed one way, creator to viewer. We think interactive is the next default for the internet," said Shourya Agarwal, founder of Flam. "The demand was always there. The technology wasn't. We have made interactivity effortless to build and deploy at enterprise scale."