Both came out of Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch aimed at AI-native filmmaking — Flick as an end-to-end short-film workspace that just raised a $6M seed, Koyal as an agentic script- and audio-to-video platform running paid pilots with major music labels.
2026-07-30 · by Moe Ameen
Two startups from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch are pushing the same bet from different directions: that one person, with AI, can direct cinematic video that used to need a crew. Flick and Koyal are both based in San Francisco, and both moved from demo to real traction across the first half of 2026.
Flick (flick.art) positions itself as "Figma for AI filmmaking" — an AI-native workspace that runs scriptwriting, storyboarding, shot generation, and editing in one place, built for creative control and character consistency rather than one-click clips. It was founded by filmmaker Zoey Zhang, who published an AI-filmmaking paper at SIGGRAPH 2025, and Ray Wang, a founding engineer on Instagram Stories. In May 2026 Flick announced a $6M seed round, with backers including True Ventures, GV, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator, and says four short films made on the platform have won more than 20 international film-festival awards.
Koyal (koyal.ai) takes an agentic approach: upload a script or an audio track, design your characters, and the system generates personalized, character-consistent video, with emotional-tone matching, multilingual support, agentic lip-sync, and natural-language directing. Built by Mehul Agarwal and Gauri Agarwal — a team out of CMU, MIT, and Meta — it uses a patent-pending consent protocol called CHARCHA, a webcam-verified "character captcha" that gates whose 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 run of YC companies.
Both remain early-stage. 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. Treat any specific price or feature as provisional.
A hero film drops once; a channel has to post every day in between. That rhythm — the weeks of feed content between big releases — is where a lot of AI-film projects go quiet, because the tool that made the film doesn't make the daily posts. Kompozy is built for exactly that cadence. Set up your AI Influencer persona pool and Persona Brief once, and Kompozy generates the recurring in-between content on autopilot: persona and avatar shorts, Text Posts, Photo Posts, Carousels, Quote Graphics, blogs, and newsletters, all in a consistent voice and look, scheduled across platforms so your channel keeps a heartbeat while the next Flick or Koyal film renders.
Then, when the film is ready, Kompozy runs the launch. Load the Flick short or Koyal music video in and it clips it into captioned vertical shorts, pulls stills into carousels, lifts lines into quote graphics, and drafts a behind-the-scenes blog and newsletter — then publishes the whole rollout to the eight primary social platforms plus blog and email, with a per-post review pipeline. The filmmaking tools make the drop; Kompozy keeps the channel alive between drops and turns each release into a coordinated, nine-destination campaign.
Two AI filmmaking startups from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch. Flick is an AI-native workspace for making short films end to end; Koyal is an agentic platform that turns a script or audio track into personalized, character-consistent video with a patent-pending likeness-consent protocol called CHARCHA.
Yes. Flick announced a $6M seed round in May 2026, with backers reported to include True Ventures, GV, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. The company says four short films made on its platform have won more than 20 international film-festival awards.
Koyal has been available in public beta, with commercial pricing not yet broadly published as of mid-2026. It has focused on paid pilots with music labels and studios, including Universal Music and T-Series, alongside beta access.
Their tools stop at the render, so you handle distribution separately. Kompozy clips the film into captioned vertical shorts, builds carousels and quote graphics from it, drafts a blog and newsletter, and schedules the launch across nine destinations — eight social platforms plus blog and email — while keeping your channel posting on autopilot between releases.