companies

Moonvalley

Toronto-based AI video research company building Marey, a text-to-video model trained only on licensed footage for professional filmmakers.

Moonvalley was founded in 2023 in Toronto by Naeem Talukdar, Mateusz Malinowski, Mik Binkowski and John Thomas. Malinowski and Binkowski are former DeepMind researchers who studied video generation, while Talukdar and Thomas had previously co-founded another startup together, giving the team a mix of research and product-building backgrounds. The company's central pitch is licensing: unlike most text-to-video models trained by scraping the open web, Moonvalley trained its Marey model exclusively on footage it has rights to use, aiming to avoid the copyright disputes that have dogged rivals and to make the output usable in commercial film and advertising production without legal risk. Marey gives filmmakers granular controls, including camera trajectory, motion transfer and pose transfer, that go beyond simple text-prompt generation, and it exited beta to general availability in mid-2025. Moonvalley has raised $154 million in total funding, including an $84 million round in 2025 backed by General Catalyst, Comcast Ventures, CoreWeave and CAA, with visual-effects veteran Ed Ulbrich later joining the company's executive team. It employs roughly 100-120 people across offices in Toronto, Los Angeles and London.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Toronto, Canada

Sector

lab