By Chibuzor Alli
Artificial intelligence interactive content company Flam has raised $40m in Series B funding as it expands its technology and enterprise business globally.
The funding round was led by QED Investors, with Claypond Capital, Martin Chavez, Olivier Pomel, Venky Harinarayan and Shah Rukh Khan participating.
Existing investors RTP Global and Dovetail also increased their investments in the company, according to a statement from Flam on Tuesday.
The company said the funding would be used to accelerate research and development of its AI models, expand its product suite and scale enterprise sales globally.
Flam said it had signed more than 100 enterprise customers in six quarters, including Google, Emirates and KFC.
Its technology is being used across marketing, product visualisation, learning and development, entertainment, fan engagement, customer support and sales.
Flam AI funding backs interactive content technology
“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.”
Flam holds more than 15 patents and offers three formats, alongside a range of AI models designed to support interactive content creation and engagement.
Flicks are interactive videos that can switch a person, product or scene during playback. The company uses a patented compression algorithm and says the videos are delivered programmatically at 50 milliseconds time-to-first-buffer.
Forge, Flam’s editing model, takes image references and changes only the specified element.
Airboards are high-fidelity 3D content delivered through a camera interface, with touch, voice interaction and haptic feedback. Flam said its 3D streaming technology loads the content in 300 milliseconds without requiring an app to be installed.
Fable, an image-to-video model, generates assets as native alpha-channel videos.
Visual Agents are human-like characters that can hold conversations and take agentic actions, providing a video-call experience rather than a traditional chat window.
Fantom handles facial expression through identity preservation and motion transfer, while Finesse handles voice in any language.
Falcon, a 26-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts large language model, delivers responses at 30 milliseconds time-to-first-token, with the company saying its pipeline returns an answer in under two seconds.
QED Investors backs Flam’s AI expansion
Nigel Morris, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at QED Investors, said the company was addressing an area of the content market that remained largely unexplored.
“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.”
The new Flam AI funding will allow the company to increase investment in its AI models while expanding its product offering and global enterprise sales operation.
The company said its growing customer base includes major international brands and businesses using its technology for commercial and customer-facing applications.
Flam targets Nigeria with SmartSense partnership
Flam is also targeting the Nigerian market through an exclusive partnership with SmartSense Technologies.
“Nigeria is an exceptionally mobile-first market, with brands and consumers that adopt new forms of digital engagement very quickly,” said Dr. Seyi, CEO of SmartSense Technologies, Flam’s exclusive partner in Nigeria.
“Flam gives brands the ability to move beyond passive content and create experiences people can interact with, respond to and participate in. Our role at SmartSense is to bring that capability into the Nigerian market, localise it for real business use cases, and help brands, agencies and enterprises deploy it at scale”.
The partnership is intended to bring Flam’s interactive AI technology to Nigerian brands, agencies and enterprises, while adapting the technology for local business applications.
SmartSense Technologies is a Nigerian technology and market-development company focused on bringing advanced AI and digital technologies to businesses, institutions and public-sector organisations across Africa.
Flam expands AI models and enterprise business
Flam was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in San Francisco, with teams in India and Japan.
The company said it holds five AI models and more than 15 patents and is used by more than 100 enterprise customers globally.
The latest funding round gives Flam additional capital to continue developing its AI technology, expand its interactive content products and increase its presence in enterprise markets around the world.
The company said its technology is designed to move digital content beyond passive viewing towards experiences in which users can interact, respond and participate.
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