Flam Raises $40 Million Series B Led by QED: What AI Interactive Content Means for Indian Businesses

Posted on 18th Sep 2026 06:11:16 in Business, Digital Marketing

Tagged as: Flam, AI interactive content, startup funding, QED Investors, Indian small business

Flam, the AI interactive content company whose technology powers tap-responsive video and 3D experiences for global brands, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by QED Investors. The round, announced on September 14, 2026, brought in Claypond Capital, former Goldman Sachs executive Martin Chavez, Datadog chief executive Olivier Pomel, Venky Harinarayan and Shah Rukh Khan's family office — with existing backers RTP Global and Dovetail doubling down.

The company was founded in 2021 by BITS Pilani alumni Shourya Agarwal, Malhar Patil and Amit Gaiki. Headquartered in San Francisco with teams in India and Japan, Flam says it has signed more than 100 enterprise customers in just six quarters — a list that includes Google, State Farm, Diageo, Reliance and Hyundai — and holds more than 15 patents on its content technology. Founder Shourya Agarwal told YourStory the company has been growing 70-80 per cent quarter on quarter.

For Indian businesses, this is worth more than a funding headline. When formats like interactive video, 3D product views and AI presenters attract this level of investor backing, it usually marks the start of the trickle-down: the formats large brands pay to pioneer become the expectations customers bring to every business — including shops, D2C brands and service firms.

What Flam Actually Builds

Flam frames its mission as moving content beyond the one-way era of text, images and video. Its founder calls interactive "the next default for the internet" — content that responds to the person viewing it instead of playing the same clip for everyone.

The company ships three core formats:

• Flicks: interactive videos that can switch the person, product or scene mid-playback. A patented compression algorithm merges the variations into a single small file, and the videos are delivered programmatically with a 50-millisecond time to first buffer — fast enough to feel like an ordinary video.
• Forge and Fable: AI production tools. Forge takes image references and changes only the element you specify; Fable generates image-to-video assets as native alpha-channel videos, which is useful for product visualisation and advertising.
• Airboards: high-fidelity 3D content that streams onto a phone's camera view in 300 milliseconds, with no app to install, supporting touch, voice and haptic interactions. It is the format for letting a customer "place" a product in their own room or try a look before buying.
• Visual Agents: human-like AI characters built for video-call-style conversations and agentic actions rather than text chats. Flam's stack combines Fantom for facial expression and motion, Finesse for multilingual voice, and Falcon, a 26-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, which the company says returns answers in under two seconds.

Enterprises use the platform for marketing, product visualisation, learning and development, entertainment, fan engagement, customer support and sales — which explains why the customer list reads like a roster of global brands.

The Deal at a Glance

• Amount: $40 million Series B
• Lead investor: QED Investors
• Other investors: Claypond Capital, Martin Chavez, Olivier Pomel, Venky Harinarayan and Shah Rukh Khan's family office, with RTP Global and Dovetail following on
• Use of funds: research and development across Flam's AI models, a broader product suite, and scaling enterprise sales globally
• Traction: more than 100 enterprise customers signed in six quarters, 15+ patents, and company-reported growth of 70-80 per cent quarter on quarter

"Almost every frontier AI content company we see is optimising what already exists," said Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner at QED Investors. "Flam pointed at something else: how much of the content ecosystem is still untouched." Sandeep Patil, a partner at QED, added that every major shift in internet content has created new platforms and new winners, and pointed to Flam's pace of AI research and the partners choosing to build on its technology.

The presence of Shah Rukh Khan's family office alongside technology investors is a signal in itself. Celebrity and consumer capital is now flowing into AI content the way it once flowed into e-commerce and quick commerce — a sign the category is being treated as a mainstream consumer-facing industry rather than a laboratory experiment.

Why This Matters for Indian Marketers and Small Businesses

Interactive marketing is not arriving in India from a standing start. Customers already tap, swipe and vote their way through brand content every day — Instagram polls and quizzes, tap-to-reveal WhatsApp messages, AR try-ons in shopping apps, and product videos on marketplaces. What is changing is the fidelity of these formats and the cost of producing them.

Three shifts are worth watching:

1. Attention is rebelling against static content. Feeds are saturated with identical-looking images and pre-roll clips. Interactive formats earn a deliberate action — a tap, a choice, a swivel — from the customer, and that action is also a data signal about what they actually care about.

2. AI is collapsing the production cost. The studio-grade work that Flam's enterprise clients commission today is built on AI models that get cheaper and more commoditised every quarter. Marketplace and advertising platforms have already started shipping free AI creative and listing tools to small sellers; interactive formats will follow the same path from premium agencies to self-serve tools.

3. Product visualisation drives conversions and cuts returns. When a customer can see a product from every angle — or place it in their own space — the gap between browsing and buying shrinks. For Indian D2C brands, where returns and cash-on-delivery refusals are a persistent cost, better visualisation is one of the cheapest margin fixes available.

What Small Businesses Should Do Now

• Use the interactive tools you already have. Instagram stories with polls, quizzes and sliders; WhatsApp quick replies, catalogs and interactive messages; marketplace listing videos and enhanced product pages. These are free formats most small sellers never test.
• Invest in product visuals before ad spend. A well-lit phone video, shot on a simple tabletop setup, now outperforms a rushed professional shoot. Platforms' AI creative tools can turn those assets into ad variations at no extra cost.
• Run honest tests. Put an interactive format against a static one in the same campaign and compare taps, enquiries and conversions — not likes. Keep the winner and repeat it.
• Watch the format curve. Interactive video, 3D and AI presenters are roughly where mobile advertising was a decade ago. Businesses that learn the format early pay the least to adopt it.

What Happens Next

Flam will spend the fresh capital on its AI models, new products and global enterprise sales — more formats, more markets and, eventually, cheaper access as competitors pile into the category. QED's bet is that the ability to build and deliver interactive content at scale becomes infrastructure, like hosting or payments, rather than a premium service.

For India's small businesses, the practical takeaway is simpler than the technology. Every wave of content — text, image, video — followed the same arc: pioneered by big brands, normalised by platforms, then expected by customers. Interactive is next in line. The businesses that start experimenting with the formats they can access today will be ready when the wave reaches them.

Sources

• Business Wire — Flam Raises $40 Million Series B to Scale AI Interactive Content
• Entrackr — AI interactive content startup Flam raises $40 Mn led by QED Investors
• YourStory — AI content startup Flam raises $40M from QED Investors, Shah Rukh Khan, and others
• BW Disrupt — San Francisco Based AI Interactive Content Firm Flam Raises $40 Mn Series B
• CIO Africa — Flam Raises $40M To Scale AI Content Platform