While everyone was arguing about AI safety this week, a quieter story was playing out that might matter more to your wallet. Flam, an AI interactive content startup founded by three BITS Pilani alumni, just closed a $40 million Series B — roughly ₹383 crore — led by QED Investors. In a funding market where most startups are fighting for scraps, Flam nearly doubled its total funding in one round. That got my attention, and once I dug into what they actually build, I understood why.
01.What is Flam, exactly?
Founded in 2021 by Shourya Agarwal, Malhar Patil and Amit Gaiki, Flam started out helping brands publish mixed-reality content online. It has since grown into an AI-powered interactive content platform used across marketing, product visualisation, learning and development, entertainment and customer engagement. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with teams in India and Japan, but its roots and engineering DNA are emphatically Indian — Inc42, Entrackr and Livemint all covered the round as a homegrown success story.
Here's the simplest way to picture the product: point your phone at a newspaper ad and the car drives off the page. Turn a pair of headphones on a packaging label and examine them from every angle. A footballer steps out of a poster and hands you a jersey. The company calls these experiences "Flams", and they run on ordinary smartphones — no app install, no fancy hardware.
02.The three formats: Flicks, Airboards and Visual Agents
Flam sells three formats. Flicks are interactive videos where the person, product or scene can change during playback, with AI compression keeping everything smooth. Airboards stream high-fidelity 3D content straight to a phone's camera interface with touch, voice and haptic interaction — and Flam claims they load in roughly 300 milliseconds. If you've ever waited 20 seconds for an AR filter to load on a budget Android phone, you know why that number is the whole ballgame. Third are Visual Agents: AI-powered human-like characters that can hold conversations and take actions.
03.Three home-grown AI models
What convinced investors isn't the demo — it's that Flam built the engine itself. The company holds more than 15 patents and has three proprietary AI models in-house: Fable generates a complete interactive experience from a prompt, Fantom captures human likeness and motion with enough fidelity to power lifelike brand ambassadors, and Falcon personalises what each viewer sees based on their context. That vertical integration is rare. Most "AI content" companies in India are thin wrappers around somebody else's API; Flam owns its full stack, from generation to on-device tracking.
04.The numbers that closed the round
The traction is what made a fintech-focused fund like QED write its biggest non-fintech cheque. Flam has signed over 100 enterprise customers in six quarters — Google, Reliance and Hyundai among them — and QED says nearly a third of the Fortune 500 has already run Flam campaigns, including Samsung and McDonald's. Flams reportedly deliver roughly three times the dwell time of standard video ads, with measurably higher recall and return on ad spend. SiliconANGLE reported the company is fast approaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue, with revenue nearly doubling each quarter. The new round, which also included Claypond Capital (Ranjan Pai's family office), Australian Gulf Capital, the SRK Family Office, and angels like Martin Chavez and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, takes Flam's total equity funding to $62.5 million after a $14–15 million round in April 2025.
It's a strong signal for the broader funding climate too. We wrote recently about Activate closing a $105 million AI-only fund, and Arcee joining the unicorn club — serious money is flowing back into Indian AI, but it's chasing real revenue now, not just slideware.
05.Why interactive content is the next battleground
Here's the thing nobody's talking about: generic AI video is becoming a commodity. Type a prompt, get a clip — every model can do it, margins are collapsing. Flam's bet is that the durable business sits one layer above, in content that responds to the viewer. Attention is the scarcest currency in advertising, and a flat video competes with millions of other flat videos. An experience that lets a customer rotate your product, talk to a brand ambassador or play with your packaging doesn't compete — it kidnaps attention. QED's Nigel Morris put it plainly: past attempts at immersive advertising always failed on cost and complexity, and AI has finally changed that equation.
For anyone building in this space, the economics are the hard part. Generation and streaming costs can quietly eat a content business alive — which is exactly why the cost-optimization chapter in our GPT-6 Astra — Zero to Hero Guide is worth a read before you launch anything AI-powered.
06.My honest take
What surprised me most isn't the money — it's that an Indian-founded team is winning in a category the West assumed would stay in Los Angeles and London. Immersive brand content was supposed to need studios, months of production and Hollywood budgets. Three engineers from BITS Pilani replaced that with three AI models and a 300-millisecond load time. My one caution: enterprise adoption of new ad formats is brutally cyclical, and QED's own admission that this is outside its comfort zone means the next round will need even stronger numbers. But as proof that Indian AI startups can own a global category rather than service one — this is the best example I've seen this month.
Key Takeaways
- Flam raised $40 million (₹383 crore) in Series B led by QED Investors, taking total equity funding to $62.5 million
- Three formats: Flicks (interactive video), Airboards (3D via camera, ~300ms load), Visual Agents (conversational AI characters)
- Three proprietary AI models — Fable, Fantom and Falcon — plus 15+ patents
- 100+ enterprise customers including Google, Reliance and Hyundai; nearly a third of the Fortune 500 has run Flam campaigns
- The round signals that Indian AI funding is back — but only for companies with real revenue and differentiated tech
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Flam and how much did it raise?
Flam, an AI interactive content startup founded by three BITS Pilani alumni, has raised $40 million (about ₹383 crore) in a Series B led by QED Investors.
Who uses Flam, and what does its tech do?
Clients include Google, Reliance and Hyundai, and nearly a third of the Fortune 500 has already run campaigns on the platform. Its “Airboards” 3D experiences load in about 300 milliseconds on ordinary phones, with no app install needed.
What This Means for You
If you're a marketer or run a D2C brand in India, this is your early warning: interactive 3D content is moving from "gimmick" to "line item", and brands that learn to brief it now will look sharp when competitors catch up. If you're a student or freelancer, interactive content design is a genuine new skill people will pay for — it sits at the intersection of prompting, 3D thinking and marketing psychology. And if you're an entrepreneur, notice what QED actually funded: not a chatbot, but AI applied to an old, boring, high-value industry problem. That pattern — pick an unsexy industry, apply AI where others see complexity — is the single most reusable lesson from this round. The GPT-6 Astra — Zero to Hero Guide covers this exact playbook, from prompting fundamentals to AI business ideas and cost control, starting at ₹149.