Zoey Zhang spent over a decade gunning for a breakthrough moment in filmmaking.
“There are hierarchies, there are gatekeepers,” Zhang told Business Insider. Without funding or industry connections, making it in film felt “almost impossible.”
Then she made her first film with artificial intelligence — an animated short — using a cacophony of AI tools. The project won the “Best Visual” award at MIT’s 2025 AI Film Hack. It was a “turning point” in her filmmaking career, Zhang said.
She quickly teamed up with her husband, Ray Wang — a former Instagram engineer — to build a tool to help her make more films using AI. The project evolved into Flick, a generative AI video startup that landed in Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch.
Flick recently raised $6 million in seed funding, Business Insider has learned exclusively. The round is backed by firms like True Ventures, GV, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, as well as angel investors.
The pitch to investors relied heavily on the founders’ story: a marriage (literally) of tech and film.
“Together they brought this combination of engineering and art,” True Ventures partner Mike Montano told Business Insider. Wang’s experience building consumer-facing products at Instagram, coupled with Zhang’s creativity and understanding of the filmmaking process, sold Montano on the team. Seeing the startup’s product demo was a crucial part of Flick’s pitch, he added.
Flick lets anyone make a short film on its platform using chat-based prompting and several AI models, including Google’s Nano Banana and Veo 3, ByteDance’s Seedance, and Midjourney. Its platform costs between $5 and $600 a month, depending on the amount of credits a user needs. The interface is designed to emulate a storyboard, allowing creators to move film frames around the canvas, add notes, and create and edit new scenes without opening new tabs. Flick emphasizes that one of its core offerings is maintaining character consistency across frames.
Wang said Flick was designed to “speak the filmmakers’ language,” so a story itself could be the focus rather than tinkering with AI tools.
Hollywood has seen a surge of platforms pitching themselves as AI solutions to filmmakers’ woes. Some startups, like Flick, have raised millions by building user-friendly platforms on top of AI models. For instance, Moments Lab, which uses raw footage to produce new content faster using AI, raised $24 million in Series B funding last year.
A loftier goal for Flick, and other competitors in this space, is democratizing access to filmmaking with these tools. In theory, this could eliminate many steps, such as buying camera equipment, hiring actors, or renting sets.
“We are well aware that people have concerns about AI replacing jobs of Hollywood,” Wang said. “We believe that we are creating more jobs.” That’s because more people will be able to make films, Wang added.
The five-person company is building out more relationships with Hollywood as it expands. It’s also considering a move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles.
“We want to show the world that we want to help people create the highest quality and aesthetic content,” Wang said.
Read the pitch deck Flick used to raise its $6 million seed round:
Note: Some slides and figures have been redacted.
Read the full article here
