Flick Raises $6M to Build the Filmmaking Platform for the AI Era
Flick (flick.art), the AI filmmaking platform from YC's Fall 2025 batch, has raised $6M in seed funding. The round was backed by True Ventures, GV (Google Ventures), Pioneer Fund, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, Formosa Capital, Olive Tree Capital, and N1, along with a group of angel investors.
Flick is an AI filmmaking software that lets people create short films entirely using AI, end-to-end. But unlike the wave of prompt-to-video tools that generate short clips for social media, when it comes to creating truly high-quality films with coherent storylines, consistent characters, and cinematic aesthetics, those tools fall short due to their lack of flexibility, creative control, and fragmented creative flow. Flick's approach is different: it offers an infinite canvas where users upload or generate text, images, and video as connected nodes, letting filmmakers think in terms of scripts, characters, and scenes rather than prompts.
The company was founded by Ray Wang and Zoey Zhang, a pairing of engineering and filmmaking. Wang was a founding engineer on Instagram's AI team, where he built the first version of Instagram Stories and helped grow it from 0 to 500M DAU. Zhang is an award-winning filmmaker who graduated from Brown and RISD. Her AI films have been nominated by over 20 film festivals, including Best Visual Award at the MIT AI Film Hackathon and Winner at the OMNI AI Film Festival. Her AI filmmaking research was published at SIGGRAPH 2025.
Alongside the funding, Flick is premiering its Residency Film Series, a collection of 13 films made by 14 filmmakers, all produced on the platform. The residency program has been part of Flick's strategy from the start: four AI short films created using Flick have already won 20+ awards at international film festivals, and the company is building a community where it produces its own AI films while collaborating with filmmakers to share behind-the-scenes workflows as reusable templates.
"When I was at Instagram in 2016 building the first version of Stories, from 0 to 500M DAU, I learned why people actually watch content: not for how fancy the videos are, but for the authenticity and stories of the people behind it."
Wang's thesis is that the same dynamic applies to AI filmmaking. The technology matters less than what creators do with it. That philosophy shows up in how Flick is designed: creators think in a non-linear way, moving back and forth freely to iterate, and to direct a film they need not just visual and character consistency but also character movement, shot angles, camera language, and emotional arc. Flick is built around that workflow rather than forcing filmmakers into a linear prompt-and-generate loop.
Flick actually started as Zhang's student project at Brown and RISD, growing out of an AI film she created that won the best visual award at the MIT film festival. From that origin, the company has evolved into what it describes as "Figma for AI filmmaking" — a professional creative tool rather than a novelty.