Interactive content startup Flam raises $40 million to expand AI technology

Interactive content startup Flam has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round to develop its artificial intelligence models and expand its enterprise sales globally.

US-based venture capital firm QED Investors led the investment. The round also attracted a prominent list of individual backers, including Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan, Claypond Capital (the investment office of Ranjan Pai), Datadog co-founder Olivier Pomel, and Martin Chavez, the vice chairman of Sixth Street and former chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs. Tech investor Venky Harinarayan also joined the round, while existing investors RTP Global and Dovetail increased their stakes.

Founded in 2021, Flam builds digital content designed to stream and respond to user inputs as quickly as standard video. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, but runs its operations with teams spread across India and Japan.

Shifting the internet to interactive media

Flam's business model is built on the premise that online communication is undergoing a fundamental shift. Shourya Agarwal, the startup's founder and chief executive, said internet content has historically moved in one-way waves from creators to viewers, starting with text, moving to images, and then to video.

"We think interactive is the next default for the internet," Agarwal said, adding that while the consumer demand for such content has existed for a long time, the underlying technology to support it was lagging.

Growing enterprise adoption

The company has spent the last year and a half scaling its corporate client list. Flam claims to have signed up more than 100 enterprise customers over the past six quarters, including major global brands such as Google, Reliance, and Hyundai.

These corporate clients use the platform for a wide range of applications, including marketing campaigns, digital product visualisation, employee learning and development, entertainment, customer support, and sales presentations.

Sandeep Patil, a partner at QED Investors, said the decision to lead the funding round was driven by Flam's growth rate and the speed of its artificial intelligence research, alongside the quality of corporate partners choosing to build on its platform.

What happens next

Flam plans to use the newly acquired capital to accelerate its research and development department, expand its core product suite, and hire more staff for its international enterprise sales teams.

It is not yet clear how the startup will split its new sales hiring between its offices in San Francisco, Japan, and India, though its engineering and product development teams have historically operated heavily out of Bengaluru.