Moonvalley
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Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
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8 citations
Review status
Source-backed
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v1 · 1,536 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Moonvalley is a generative-AI research company that builds video-generation models for professional filmmakers, studios, and brands. It is best known for Marey, a foundational text-to-video and image-to-video model that the company says is trained exclusively on fully licensed and public-domain footage rather than on data scraped from the open web. Moonvalley positions Marey as a legally "clean," production-grade alternative to consumer generative AI video tools, aiming to give directors granular creative control while reducing the copyright exposure that has dogged the broader AI video sector. The company was co-founded by entrepreneur Naeem Talukdar together with former Google DeepMind researchers, and it works closely with the artist-led AI film studio Asteria. As of mid-2025 Moonvalley had raised about $154 million from investors including General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), and CoreWeave. [1][2][3]
Moonvalley describes itself as an "imagination research company" developing next-generation creative tools for the film and advertising industries. Its core product, Marey, is marketed as the first production-grade AI video model built specifically for professional production workflows rather than casual social-media use. [2][4]
The company's central differentiator is its data sourcing. Where many leading AI video systems are trained on large quantities of video gathered from platforms such as YouTube, Moonvalley says Marey is trained only on footage it has licensed directly from rights holders, plus public-domain material. The company frames this as both an ethical stance toward creators and a commercial feature: studios and brands that use licensed-data tools face lower risk of being entangled in the copyright lawsuits that have been filed against several generative-AI companies. [3][4][5]
Moonvalley is headquartered in Los Angeles, with engineering roots in Toronto, and reported roughly 100 employees in 2025. Its team draws talent from DeepMind, Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, and entertainment companies including Disney and DreamWorks. [1][2]
Moonvalley was founded around 2022 to 2023 (the company passed through Y Combinator and is generally dated to 2023 in funding databases). Its chief executive and co-founder is Naeem Talukdar, an entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a startup called Draft with John Thomas, who serves as Moonvalley's chief operating officer. [4][6]
Much of Moonvalley's technical credibility comes from its research co-founders, who previously worked on video-generation systems at Google DeepMind:
This combination of a consumer-technology operator as CEO and senior DeepMind researchers on the science side is a recurring theme in how the company presents itself: business and storytelling expertise paired with frontier video-model research. [1][2]
Marey is Moonvalley's foundational AI video model. According to the company, it is named after Etienne-Jules Marey (1830 to 1904), the French scientist and chronophotography pioneer whose sequential motion studies in the 1880s helped lay the groundwork for cinema. [4]
Moonvalley made Marey generally available in July 2025, having first developed it in collaboration with the studio Asteria beginning in late 2024. Marey is built for filmmaker-style control rather than one-shot prompting, and the company emphasizes that it can be steered with precise, director-oriented tools. Reported and advertised capabilities include: [2][3][4]
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Output resolution | Native 1080p video |
| Clip length | Up to 5 seconds per generation |
| Frame rate | 24 frames per second |
| Aspect ratios | Widescreen through vertical |
| Camera control | Pan, zoom, dolly, handheld, and near-360-degree moves |
| Motion control | Transfers motion between subjects while respecting physics |
| Scene editing | Character superimposition, facial and gesture transfer, background changes |
| Roadmap features | Lighting controls, object-trajectory control, character libraries |
Moonvalley describes Marey as a "3D-aware" model with an understanding of physical laws, which it says allows the system to keep motion plausible (for example, translating the gait of a running animal onto a moving vehicle while preserving realistic interaction with the ground). The model is sold via subscription, with monthly credit tiers reported at $14.99 (100 credits), $34.99 (250 credits), and $149.99 (1,000 credits). [2][3]
The licensed-data strategy is the heart of Moonvalley's pitch. The company says it spent months building direct relationships with creators and agencies to license footage, rather than scraping the internet, and that all training data comes from intellectual-property owners or the public domain. By Moonvalley's account, roughly 80 percent of the training footage was sourced from independent filmmakers and agencies that had accumulated B-roll libraries over the years, with creators compensated for the use of their material. [3][5]
Moonvalley markets Marey as a "clean" or "fully licensed" foundation model and argues this makes it safer for professional use, since studios and advertisers are wary of building marketing campaigns or productions on tools whose training data is the subject of litigation. This positioning is explicitly contrasted with the broader industry context, in which several AI image and video generators have faced copyright suits over the use of unlicensed work. The company has presented its model as a way for Hollywood to engage with AI while, in the words of partners involved, allowing the creative community to "take a stand" on consent and compensation. [3][5][7]
Independent filmmaker Angel Manuel Soto, who had previously worked with Moonvalley's studio side on the HBO project "Menudo: Forever Young," reported cutting production costs by 20 to 40 percent using Marey, an example the company cites for the model's professional utility. [3]
Moonvalley's funding has been raised across multiple rounds, and the totals reported vary by source and date, so figures should be read as cumulative estimates:
A distinctive feature of Moonvalley's cap table is the presence of entertainment-industry backers: CAA, one of Hollywood's largest talent agencies, and Comcast Ventures, the venture arm tied to the NBCUniversal parent. CoreWeave, an AI-focused cloud provider, brings compute capacity. [1]
Moonvalley is also tightly linked to Asteria, an artist-led generative-AI film and animation studio co-founded by documentary producer Bryn Mooser and actor and director Natasha Lyonne. Asteria (which grew out of Mooser's earlier ventures and the acquisition of Late Night Labs) partnered with Moonvalley starting in late 2024 to co-develop Marey, and the two became closely integrated in 2025, with General Catalyst a shareholder in both. Mooser is named as a Moonvalley co-founder and as Asteria's chief executive. Asteria has announced an AI-assisted hybrid feature, "Uncanny Valley," to be directed by Lyonne and co-written with Brit Marling, using Marey as its underlying model. [1][7]
Moonvalley operates in a crowded and fast-moving AI video market. Its better-known competitors include Runway, OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo, Kuaishou's Kling, Luma AI's Dream Machine, and Pika. Most of these systems do not foreground a fully licensed training-data approach, and several of the companies behind them have faced scrutiny or litigation over the data used to train their generative models. [3][4]
Within that landscape, Moonvalley's significance lies less in raw model leadership and more in its strategic bet that the professional market, Hollywood studios, advertising agencies, and brands, will pay a premium for tools whose provenance is legally defensible and whose controls are built for real production. By pairing DeepMind-pedigree research with licensed data, entertainment-industry investors such as CAA and Comcast, and a creative partner in Asteria, Moonvalley has become a leading example of the "clean" or "ethical" AI video movement, an approach that treats consent, compensation, and copyright safety as core product features rather than afterthoughts. [1][3][5][7]