An AI startup raised $24M to help media companies make high-quality video faster and cheaper. Here’s its pitch deck.

Moments Lab is part of a growing number of AI startups raising money to reshape Hollywood and related fields.

Moments Lab provides tools that index video libraries and create new videos from raw footage.

The company recently raised $24 million in Series B funding from Oxx, with participation from Orange Ventures, Kadmos, Supernova Invest, and Elaia Partners. It plans to use the funding to build on its existing tech and roll out an agentic AI tool. To date, it’s raised $37.4 million.

Paris-based Moments Lab was founded by twin brothers Fred and Philippe Petitpont in 2016. Philippe was a product manager for French media company TF1 Group, while Fred was a tech lead at French ad holding company Havas’ BETC Digital. They say they saw a need for media and entertainment companies to produce more video at a lower cost to feed the growing streaming ecosystem. Their clients include Warner Bros. Discovery, Banijay Entertainment, Fullwell Entertainment, Hearst, Thomson Reuters, Sinclair, and Amazon Ads.

Moments Lab’s core tool, MXT-2, breaks down and indexes video footage into components, like people who are on screen and what they’re doing, and generates descriptions of them.

Its key pitch is that it saves users time and money. Philippe Petitpont said the tech can identify soundbites for clips for social media and things like trailers and highlight reels about seven times as fast as an employee could, citing internal research. He also said some clients have reported making twice as much revenue from social media using the product.

“For them, it’s a way to create new revenue streams,” Petitpont told Business Insider, referring to revenue from social media. “Before now, it was very complicated for production companies to create a revenue stream because there was a huge need for humans — it’s a very tedious task.”

Moments Lab’s newer agentic AI tool, which it says Hearst is among those testing, takes raw video material and turns it into rough cuts using written prompts.

Petitpont said the AI agent can do this at a fraction of the time it takes people to do the work. He said its most promising application so far is in reality TV. Scripted TV is still a work in progress.

Petitpont said Moments Lab has gained momentum with Hollywood companies since the beginning of the year, as they face pressure to make more shows at lower costs. He said it’s signed a big studio as a client, though he wouldn’t name it.

“The demand from Netflix, Amazon’s Prime Video, Peacock, is so strong that production companies need to produce more content than ever before, and they don’t have more money to produce a show,” he said. “Being able to produce at lower cost is more important than ever. That’s where they’re interested in using new approaches.”

AI tools are widely used in Hollywood to make production processes more efficient and, for now, generate short videos from text.

But Hollywood is highly protective of its intellectual property, which is a barrier to adoption. Another is its labor unions, which worry that AI will replace their members.

Petitpont said one of the most time-consuming parts of the sales process is assuring companies’ legal teams that it won’t use their IP to train its model.

Moments Lab says its model is trained on a dataset of 1.5 billion assets that it describes as a mix of open-source content and content from partners that are part of its research program (a consortium of research labs, media rights owners, and tech companies).

The company doesn’t shy away from the idea that automating work done by assistant editors and others can reduce the need for human workers. Petitpont said one US financial media client told him it expects to use fewer editors as a result of using its tech.

“The big question is: Will the assistant start to be the senior editor, or will the job disappear?” he said. “We don’t know yet.”

One thing there seems to be broad agreement on in the industry is that AI usage will grow — not only to save time on pre- and post-production functions, but make high-quality original video fast.

Other startups that tackle film editing functions include Runway, Filmustage, and Imaginario.

Petitpont said the ability for media companies to use AI to help make full-length documentaries based on their video libraries is only several months off, imagining a company building a film on the history of America using decades of news footage.

In a year, he expects Moments Lab to be able to provide predictive modeling tools that will let editors maximize the audience a given video will get.

“That’s what we believe will be the next thing, and we’re not very far from that because audience data is very easily available on YouTube,” he said. “The tech is not the issue, it’s more the rights.”

Check out key slides from the pitch deck Moments Lab used to raise its Series B, with some confidential information removed.

Moments Lab’s deck shows how it indexes video

It tackles the problem of video’s cost and time

Moments Lab spells out the problem it solves: video’s time and cost.

Here’s the text from the slide:

Video is the best way to engage an audience.

But creating videos is crazy expensive and takes a lot of time.

$1,000 per min of finished product.

1 week to produce a 5 min video.

Moments Labs sees a big opportunity

It sees a chance to create a video from raw footage.

The slide reads:

There is no tool to generate engaging videos from recorded footage.

Meaning the 100,000 videos uploaded to YouTube daily are produced entirely manually.

That’s just YouTube.

Moments Lab breaks down the process of making video

The company divides the process of making video into eight parts: Editorial Briefing; Acquire/Record footage; Ingest footage; Index, Organize, Find footage; Rough Cut; Review; Fine Tuning; Publishing.

Each part of making video has a cost

The company breaks down all the places it sees cost savings from making video and associated costs.

The slide reads:

Where are the opportunities?

• Editorial briefing: Starting point of the value chain, where users want to focus time
• Acquire/record footage: Relevant footage is spread across many different locations. $9.5 billion in stock footage industry
• Ingest, index, organize, find footage: Indexing content manually is impossible at scale however key. $50 billion in media asset management tools and services
• Rough cut: Editing the rough cut requires high quality indexing. Review, fine-tuning: Where creative users want to focus time. $145 billion in creative video industry
• Publishing: Adding metadata and SEO descriptions is long. $16 billion in social media tools

Moments Lab’s AI tool helps users turn videos into clips

The company says its AI helps creative users find the best clips they need, cutting time spent sourcing and indexing video by 80%.

Its clients are in sports, media, and consumer brands

Moments Lab lists some of its clients, including Hearst, LVMH, Banijay Entertainment, and Brut.

It also gives proof points:

• 15,000 users
• 250,000 hours of video
• 50 enterprise customers
• 3,000 hours of video processed daily

The company touts its expertise and awards

The slide reads:

Proprietary Multimodal AI Model:

• Built by +30 engineering talents with deep industry knowledge combined with advanced research capabilities
• Established research program between our customers and labs, such as IP Paris, TSP, AI For Media
• Continuous IP development
• Multi-awarded by the video industry

It’s working to make rough cuts from raw footage

Moments Labs describes its forthcoming AI agent, which it says will create rough cuts out of raw video footage from text prompts.

It cuts the time it takes to sift through raw footage

This slide shows how its video tool can create a teaser from existing video using a prompt.

The slide reads:

AI Solution to give precious time back to Content Creators

Forget spending hours sifting through footage. Our AI Video Advisor will handle the heavy lifting, delivering a pre-assembled rough cut that captures the moments that matter.

Now Content Creators can focus their time on final editing and applying their creative magic.

Moments Lab’s key employees and investors

The slide lists the company’s founders, key employees, financials, Series A investors, and technology. It reads:

Founders: Phil Petitpont, CEO (ex. TF1 Group), Fred Petitpont, CTPO (ex. Havas Group)

Series A Investors: Elaia Partners, Deeptech Fund; SuperNova Invest + Angels

Key employees (total 57): Thibault Chassagnette, Head of Engineering (ex. AWS); Yannis Tevisen, Head of Science (PhD in Multimodal Processing); Carole Pigeard, VP Sales (ex. Ross Video)

Advisor: JP Maheu (ex. Twitter)

Key Financials: $20 Million raised to date

Technology: Patented MXT Technology, Multimodal & Generative AI

Stack: Kotlin, Akka, Python, Typescript, MongoDB, Event Sourcing, VectorDB

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