Shah Rukh Khan Backs AI Startup Flam as It Raises $40 Million in Series B Funding

17 Sep 2026, 10:36 by Vinay Kakkad · KalingaTV

Interactive media technology developer Flam has secured $40 million in a Series B financing round steered by venture capital firm QED Investors, drawing high-profile backing from Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan.

The round also attracted capital from Claypond Capital alongside angel investors Martin Chavez, Datadog founder Olivier Pomel, and Venky Harinarayan. Prior institutional backers RTP Global and Dovetail increased their stakes by participating in the tranche.

Flam intends to deploy the fresh capital toward expanding research and development on its proprietary artificial intelligence models, broadening its commercial product line, and scaling its enterprise go-to-market operations across global regions.

The company, dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Bengaluru with staff distributed across India and Japan, was set up in 2021 by BITS Pilani graduates Shourya Agarwal, Malhar Patil, and Amit Gaiki. Prior to this round, Flam had raised a $14 million Series A led by RTP Global in May 2025.

Operationally, the startup operates in a niche focused on turning static, broadcast-style digital content into responsive user experiences. Its client footprint has surpassed 100 enterprise accounts accumulated over six quarters, spanning multinationals and conglomerates such as Google, Hyundai, Reliance, State Farm, and Diageo. It has also engaged Singapore-headquartered Grab and forged a regional alliance with Indonesian media and technology group Elang Mahkota Teknologi (Emtek) to extend its footprint across Southeast Asian consumer brands.

These enterprise clients apply Flam’s infrastructure to marketing campaigns, product visualisation, corporate training, interactive entertainment, fan engagement, customer service desks, and direct sales. While initial deployment was rooted in the fast-moving consumer goods vertical, the venture has since expanded into the entertainment industry, logging quarter-on-quarter growth between 70% and 80% that leadership expects to sustain.

The company’s core technological architecture comprises artificial intelligence models supported by a portfolio of more than 15 patents. Its current market offerings fall into three primary formats:

Flicks: Dynamically rendered videos capable of altering on-screen individuals, showcased items, or environmental backdrops during live playback. The format relies on a patented compression system engineered to initiate programmatic delivery at a 50-millisecond time-to-first-buffer.

Forge and Fable: Editing and generation engines where Forge modifies isolated elements using external image cues, while Fable generates source visual assets formatted directly as native alpha-channel video streams.

Airboards: Browser-accessible 3D spatial environments delivered via camera viewports, incorporating touch gestures, audio inputs, and haptic feedback. Streaming assets load within 300 milliseconds without requiring client-side application downloads.

Visual Agents: Full-bodied conversational personas designed to conduct human-like exchanges and execute autonomous tasks via interactive video interfaces. This framework integrates Fantom for identity retention and facial motion replication, Finesse for multilingual vocal delivery, and Falcon, a 26-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts large language model registering a 30-millisecond time-to-first-token. The entire loop is calibrated to generate contextual feedback within two seconds.

Explaining the startup’s foundational thesis, founder Shourya Agarwal noted that digital media formats historically progressed from plain text to photography and streaming video, but remained strictly unidirectional from publisher to consumer. He remarked that while commercial appetite for bidirectional content had existed for years, technical limitations had held it back until recent advances made real-time enterprise interactivity practical to deploy.