Moonvalley's Naeem Talukdar is selling Hollywood the one thing rival AI video tools cannot: legal cover
The Toronto and Los Angeles startup trained its Marey model only on licensed footage. As studios sue their way through the generative AI boom, that decision is becoming its sharpest selling point.
While most generative video tools have trained on whatever could be scraped from the open web, Moonvalley has gone the other way. Its flagship model Marey is built exclusively on licensed and public-domain footage, a choice chief executive and co-founder Naeem Talukdar now markets as the company's biggest commercial advantage.
The timing is pointed. Disney and NBCUniversal have taken legal action against Midjourney over the use of their properties, and studios have grown wary of the copyright exposure that comes with AI-generated imagery. That scrutiny mirrors a wider trust problem, with AI-generated reports turning up riddled with hallucinations even at blue-chip firms. Talukdar built Marey around that anxiety. He has said directors need precise control over every creative decision "plus legal confidence for commercial use", and that every frame the model produces is cleared for commercial use because the training data was fully licensed.
Investors have backed the thesis. An $84m round led by General Catalyst, with participation from talent agency CAA, cloud provider CoreWeave, Comcast Ventures and existing backers Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, brought total funding to $154m and made Moonvalley one of the best-capitalised names in AI filmmaking. The company has hired serious credibility too. Visual effects veteran Ed Ulbrich, whose credits include Titanic and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, joined in a senior role and cited the model's clean training data as a key draw.
Moonvalley also owns Asteria, the AI studio led by Bryn Mooser that has ties to a venture co-led by actress and producer Natasha Lyonne, giving the startup a foothold inside production rather than just selling tools to it. Three former Google DeepMind senior research scientists lead the technical team.
Marey is not trying to out-muscle OpenAI's Sora on raw spectacle. It offers frame-level camera control, 3D-aware scene manipulation and editable shots aimed at professionals, with output capped at short clips in line with current models. Its largest rival is also gearing up for the public markets, with OpenAI filing to go public as the AI giants race to Wall Street. The pitch is control and compliance over novelty. Talukdar has said the company had positive gross margins on inference over six months and is working through a pipeline of studio deals, a relationships-led model that bets filmmakers will pay for certainty in a market still nervous about where AI footage comes from. The commercial stakes are widening as platforms rethink how premium video is monetised, from Fifa's World Cup streaming playbook to the arrival of vetted, "commercially safe" models from the likes of Anthropic.