AI Startup Flam Raises $40m to Scale Interactive Content Technology

Artificial intelligence interactive content company Flam has raised $40 million in Series B funding as it looks to expand its AI models, product portfolio and enterprise operations globally.

The funding round was led by QED Investors, with participation from Claypond Capital, Martin Chavez, Olivier Pomel, Venky Harinarayan and Shah Rukh Khan.

Existing investors RTP Global and Dovetail also increased their investments in the company, Flam said in a statement on Tuesday.

Founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco, Flam develops AI-powered technology that allows businesses to create interactive digital content across areas including marketing, product visualisation, learning and development, entertainment, customer support, sales and fan engagement.

The company said it has signed more than 100 enterprise customers within six quarters, with Google, Emirates and KFC among companies using its technology.

Building the Next Generation of Interactive Content

Flam founder Shourya Agarwal said the company was established around the idea that digital content is moving towards greater interactivity.

According to Agarwal, previous shifts in online content — from text to images and subsequently video — have largely maintained a one-way relationship between creators and audiences.

Flam believes interactive experiences could represent the next major evolution of internet content, allowing audiences to actively participate rather than simply consume.

“The demand was always there. The technology wasn’t. We have made interactivity effortless to build and deploy at enterprise scale,” Agarwal said.

Flam currently holds more than 15 patents and has developed a suite of technologies designed to enable interactive content at scale.

Its Flicks product allows interactive videos to switch between people, products or scenes during playback. The technology uses a patented compression algorithm and is delivered programmatically with a reported 50-millisecond time-to-first-buffer.

Forge, the company’s editing model, allows users to provide image references and modify specific elements while preserving the remainder of an image.

Airboards provide high-fidelity 3D content through a camera interface and support touch, voice and haptic interactions. Flam said its 3D streaming technology can load the experiences in approximately 300 milliseconds without requiring users to install an application.

Fable, meanwhile, is the company’s image-to-video model and generates assets as native alpha-channel videos.

Expanding AI-Powered Digital Experiences

Flam has also developed Visual Agents, human-like digital characters capable of holding conversations and taking agentic actions.

The technology is designed to provide an experience closer to a video call than a conventional text-based chatbot.

Supporting the system are several of Flam’s proprietary AI technologies. Fantom handles facial expressions through identity preservation and motion transfer, while Finesse manages voice interactions across languages.

Falcon, Flam’s 26-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts large language model, is designed to deliver responses with a reported 30-millisecond time-to-first-token, with the overall pipeline returning responses in under two seconds.

QED Investors Co-Founder and Managing Partner Nigel Morris said Flam stood out because of its focus on expanding the range of content that can benefit from artificial intelligence rather than simply improving existing formats.

He said the company had developed infrastructure capable of addressing a significant portion of the content ecosystem that remains largely untouched by emerging AI technologies.

Flam Targets Nigerian Market

Nigeria is also expected to play a role in Flam’s international expansion, with SmartSense Technologies serving as the company’s exclusive partner in the country.

SmartSense Technologies CEO Dr. Seyi described Nigeria as a highly mobile-first market where businesses and consumers are quick to adopt new forms of digital engagement.

He said Flam’s technology could enable Nigerian brands to move beyond passive digital content by creating experiences that consumers can interact with and participate in.

SmartSense plans to localise Flam’s technology for the Nigerian market and support brands, agencies and enterprises seeking to deploy the platform across practical business use cases.

The partnership could open opportunities for Nigerian businesses to apply interactive AI across advertising, customer engagement, product demonstrations, sales, entertainment and other digital experiences.

Funding to Support Global Expansion

Flam said proceeds from the Series B round will be directed towards research and development of its AI models, expansion of its product suite and the scaling of enterprise sales globally.

The company currently operates with teams in India and Japan alongside its San Francisco headquarters.

With more than 100 enterprise customers, five AI models and over 15 patents, Flam is positioning itself around a broader shift from passive digital media towards content that allows consumers to interact directly with brands, products and digital characters.

Its latest funding round provides additional capital to develop that technology and expand its enterprise footprint as businesses explore new ways of applying generative and interactive AI to customer experiences.