Two Y Combinator AI filmmaking startups — Flick, an AI-native workspace for making short films end to end, and Koyal, an agentic platform that turns a script or audio track into personalized, cinematic video.
Last verified · 2026-07-30 · by Moe Ameen
Flick and Koyal are two AI filmmaking startups from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, both based in San Francisco and both aimed at the same broad idea: let one person direct cinematic video with AI instead of a crew. They approach it from different angles.
Flick (flick.art) calls itself "Figma for AI filmmaking" — an AI-native workspace that runs the whole short-film pipeline in one place: scriptwriting, storyboarding, shot generation, and editing, with an emphasis on creative control and character consistency rather than one-click generation. It was founded by Zoey Zhang, a filmmaker whose AI films have been recognized at festivals and who published an AI-filmmaking paper at SIGGRAPH 2025, and Ray Wang, a founding engineer on Instagram Stories. Flick raised a $6M seed round announced in May 2026, and the company says four short films made on the platform have won 20-plus international film-festival awards.
Koyal (koyal.ai) is an agentic AI filmmaking platform that converts a script or an audio track into personalized, visually coherent video — you upload audio or a script, design characters, and the system generates the scenes. Its features include emotional-tone recognition from voice or text, character consistency across scenes with multilingual support, agentic lip-sync, and natural-language directing (storyboard, reshoot, refine). It's built by Mehul Agarwal and Gauri Agarwal, a team out of CMU, MIT, and Meta, and it uses a patent-pending consent protocol called CHARCHA — a "character captcha" that requires webcam verification before a person's likeness can be used, presented at NeurIPS 2024. Koyal has run paid pilots with Universal Music, T-Series, and Bollywood studios, produced music videos for Grammy- and Oscar-winning artists, and made launch videos for a group of YC companies.
Both are early. Flick is live and self-serve, with public, credit-based subscription tiers and a free starter credit allotment; Koyal has been available in limited public beta with commercial pricing not yet broadly published. Read any specific price or spec as subject to change, and note what both do and don't do: they generate finished or near-finished video, but neither is a social-distribution engine — captioning for a feed, cutting a film into vertical shorts, spinning stills into carousels, and scheduling across platforms are separate steps that happen after the render.
A finished film or music video is a hero asset, not a content calendar. Flick and Koyal are excellent at making that one polished piece; the harder, unglamorous part is turning it into the weeks of feed content that actually get it watched. That's the gap Kompozy fills. Bring a Flick short or a Koyal music video into Kompozy and it becomes source material for a whole promo campaign: cut the long piece into vertical Clipped Shorts with word-synced captions, pull the best frames into a Carousel or Photo Posts, lift a memorable line into a Quote Graphic, write a behind-the-scenes Blog Article and an Email Newsletter, and generate Text Posts teasing the drop — all governed by your Persona Brief so the promo voice matches the film.
Then Kompozy ships it. Instead of exporting once per network and re-uploading by hand, you fan the same launch out to the eight primary social platforms — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, and Threads — plus a blog and an email, with scheduling, a per-post review pipeline, and autopilot. Flick and Koyal make the film; Kompozy turns one render into a coordinated, multi-format release across nine destinations.
Flick and Koyal are two AI filmmaking startups from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch. Flick is an AI-native workspace for making short films end to end — script, storyboard, shots, and edit in one place. Koyal is an agentic platform that turns a script or audio track into personalized, character-consistent video, with a patent-pending consent protocol called CHARCHA.
Flick is built around directing a short film with full creative control across the whole pipeline, positioned as "Figma for AI filmmaking." Koyal starts from a script or audio and generates personalized story and music videos with emotional-tone matching, multilingual character consistency, and webcam-verified likeness consent. Flick leans toward filmmakers; Koyal has focused on music-label and studio pilots.
Both are early. Flick is live and self-serve, with public, credit-based subscription tiers and a free starter credit allotment as of 2026; Koyal has been available in limited public beta with commercial pricing not yet broadly published. Check each site for current access and pricing before you rely on a figure.
Flick and Koyal make the finished film or video; Kompozy turns it into a distribution campaign. Load a render into Kompozy and it clips it into captioned vertical shorts, builds carousels and quote graphics from it, drafts a blog and newsletter around it, and schedules and publishes the whole set across nine destinations — eight social platforms plus blog and email.
They are creation tools, not schedulers — their job ends at the render. Getting that video captioned for a feed, cut into shorts, turned into stills and text, and posted across platforms on a schedule is a separate step, which is where a publishing engine like Kompozy fits.